ua 


ACJR 

J4»  PACIFIC  AVENUE 

UMJa  SVAOH.  CAL/r 


SUPERSEDED 


The  Divine  Fire 

BY  MAY  SINCLAIR.     $1.50 

This  remarkable  story  of  the  regeneration  of 
a  London  poet  and  the  degeneration  of  a  Lon- 
don critic  has  been  printed  more  than  a  dozen 
times. 

Mary  Moss  in  the  Atlantic  Monthly:  "Cer- 
tain it  is  that  in  all  our  new  fiction  I  have  found 
nothing  worthy  to  compare  with  'The  Divine 
Fire,'  nothing  even  remotely  approaching  the 
same  class." 

World's  Work :  "  From  any  point  of  view  it 
is  an  unusual  novel,  as  much  better  than  some 
of  the  'best  sellers'  as  a  painting  is  better  than 
a  chromo." 

New  York  Globe :  "  The  biggest  surprise  of 
the  whole  season's  fiction  .  .  .  you  never  once 
stop  to  question  its  style,  or  its  realism,  or  the 
art  of  its  construction.  You  simply  read  right 
on,  deaf  to  everything  and  everybody  outside 
of  the  compelling  magic  of  its  pages." 

Dial:  "  A  full-length  study  of  the  poetic  tem- 
perament, framed  in  a  varied  and  curiously  in- 
teresting environment,  and  drawn  with  a  firm- 
ness of  hand  that  excites  one's  admiration. 
.  .  .  Moreover,  a  real  distinction  of  style,  be- 
sides being  of  absorbing  interest  from  cover  to 
cover." 

Catholic  Mirror :  "One  of  the  noblest,  most 
inspiring  and  absorbing  books  we  have  read  in 
years." 

Owen  Seaman  in  Punch  (London):  "I  find 
her  book  the  most  remarkable  that  I  have  read 
for  many  years." 

Henry   Holt   and   Company 

Publishers  New  York 


SUPERSEDED 


BY 

MAY    SINCLAIR 

Author  of  "  The  Divine  Fire" 


NEW  YORK 

HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 
1906 


A  UTHOR'S  EDITION 


SRL8 
URL' 

5137072 


PUBLISHERS'  NOTE 

Miss  Sinclair  has  expressed  a  desire  to 
have  this  book  republished  in  America,  be- 
cause she  considers  it  the  best  of  her  work 
previous  to  "The  Divine  Fire."  It  originally 
appeared  with  another  work  in  a  volume  en- 
titled "Two  Sides  of  a  Question,"  a  small 
imported  edition  of  which  is  now  exhausted. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.     PROLOGUE. — Miss    QUINCEY    STOPS   THE 

WAY i 

II.     HOUSEHOLD  GODS 12 

III.  INAUGURAL  ADDRESSES      ....      21 

IV.  BASTIAN  CAUTLEY,  M.  D.        .        .        .33 
V.     HEALERS  AND  REGENERATORS  .        .      52 

VI.  SPRING  FASHIONS 63 

VII.  UNDER  A  BLUE  MOON       ....  86 

VIII.  A  PAINFUL  MISUNDERSTANDING        .        .  102 

IX.  THROUGH  THE  STETHOSCOPE    .        .        .123 

X.  Miss  QUINCEY  STANDS  BACK   .        .        .  135 

XI.  DR.  CAUTLEY  SENDS  IN  His  BILL           .  161 

XII.  EPILOGUE. — THE  MAN  AND  THE  WOMAN  172 


SUPERSEDED 

CHAPTER  I 
prologue.— flbiss  (Quinces  Stope  tbe  Winy 

TAND   back,   Miss   Quincey,   if  you 

please." 

The  school  was  filing  out  along  the  main 
corridor  of  St.  Sidwell's.  It  came  with  a 
tramp  and  a  rustle  and  a  hiss  and  a  tramp, 
urged  to  a  trot  by  the  excited  teachers.  The 
First  Division  first,  half-woman,  carrying  it- 
self smoothly,  with  a  swish  of  its  long  skirts, 
with  a  blush,  a  dreamy  intellectual  smile,  or 
a  steadfast  impenetrable  air,  as  it  happened 
to  be  more  or  less  conscious  of  the  presence 
of  the  Head.  Then  the  Second  Division, 
light-hearted,  irrepressible,  making  a  noise 
with  its  feet,  loose  hair  flapping,  pig-tails 
flopping  to  the  beat  of  its  march.  Then  the 
straggling,  diminishing  lines  of  the  Third,  a 


2  Superseded 

froth  of  white  pinafores,  a  confusion  of  legs, 
black  or  tan,  staggering,  shifting,  shuffling 
in  a  frantic  effort  to  keep  time. 

On  it  came  in  a  waving  stream;  a  stream 
that  flickered  with  innumerable  eyes,  a 
stream  that  rippled  with  the  wind  of  its  own 
flowing,  that  flushed  and  paled  and  bright- 
ened as  some  flower-face  was  tossed  up- 
wards, or  some  crest,  flame-coloured  or 
golden,  flung  back  the  light.  A  stream  that 
was  one  in  its  rhythm  and  in  the  sex  that  was 
its  soul,  obscurely  or  luminously  feminine; 
it  might  have  been  a  single  living  thing  that 
throbbed  and  undulated,  as  girl  after  girl 
gave  out  the  radiance  and  pulsation  of  her 
youth.  The  effect  was  overpowering;  your 
senses  judged  St.  Sidwell's  by  these  brilliant 
types  that  gave  life  and  colour  to  the  stream. 
The  rest  were  nowhere. 

So  at  least  it  seemed  to  Miss  Cursiter,  the 
Head.  That  tall,  lean,  iron-grey  Dignity 
stood  at  the  cross  junction  of  two  corridors, 
talking  to  Miss  Rhoda  Vivian,  the  new 
Classical  Mistress.  And  while  she  talked  she 


Miss  Quincey  Stops  the  Way     3 

watched  her  girls  as  a  general  watches  his 
columns  wheeling  into  action.  A  dangerous 
spot  that  meeting  of  the  corridors.  There 
the  procession  doubles  the  corner  at  a  swing- 
ing curve,  and  there,  time  it  as  she  would, 
the  little  arithmetic  teacher  was  doomed  to 
fall  foul  of  the  procession.  Daily  Miss 
Quincey  thought  to  dodge  the  line;  daily  it 
caught  her  at  the  disastrous  corner.  Then 
Miss  Quincey,  desperate  under  the  eye  of  the 
Head,  would  try  to  rush  the  thing,  with 
ridiculous  results.  And  Fate  or  the  Order 
of  the  day  contrived  that  Miss  Cursiter 
should  always  be  there  to  witness  her  con- 
fusion. Nothing  escaped  Miss  Cursiter;  if 
her  face  grew  tender  for  the  young  girls  and 
the  eight-year-olds,  at  the  sight  of  Miss 
Quincey  it  stiffened  into  tolerance,  cynic- 
ally braced  to  bear.  Miss  Cursiter  had  an 
eye  for  magnificence  of  effect,  and  the  un- 
seemly impact  of  Miss  Quincey  was  apt  to 
throw  the  lines  into  disorder,  demoralising 
the  younger  units  and  ruining  the  spectacle 
as  a  whole.  To-day  it  made  the  new  Classi- 


4  Superseded 

cal  Mistress  smile,  and  somehow  that  smile 
annoyed  Miss  Cursiter. 

She,  Miss  Quincey,  was  a  little  dry,  brown 
woman,  with  a  soft  pinched  mouth,  and  a 
dejected  nose.  So  small  and  insignificant 
was  she  that  she  might  have  crept  along  for 
ever  unnoticed  but  for  her  punctuality  in  ob- 
struction. As  St.  Sidwell's  prided  itself  on 
the  brilliance  and  efficiency  of  its  staff,  the 
wonder  was  how  Miss  Quincey  came  to  be 
there,  but  there  she  had  been  for  five-and- 
twenty  years.  She  seemed  to  have  stiffened 
into  her  place.  Five-and-twenty  years  ago 
she  had  been  arithmetic  teacher,  vaguely  at- 
tached to  the  Second  Division,  and  she  was 
arithmetic  teacher  still.  Miss  Quincey  was 
going  on  for  fifty;  she  had  out-lived  the  old 
Head,  and  now  she  was  the  oldest  teacher 
there,  twice  as  old  as  Miss  Vivian,  the  new 
Classical  Mistress,  older,  far  older  than  Miss 
Cursiter.  She  had  found  her  way  into  St. 
Sidwell's,  not  because  she  was  brilliant  or 
efficient,  but  because  her  younger  sister 
Louisa  already  held  an  important  post  there. 


Miss  Quincey  Stops  the  Way     5 

Louisa  was  brilliant  and  efficient  enough  for 
anybody,  so  brilliant  and  so  efficient  that  the 
glory  of  it  rested  on  her  family.  And  when 
she  married  the  Greek  master  and  went  away 
Juliana  stayed  on  as  a  matter  of  course, 
wearing  a  second-hand  aureole  of  scholar- 
ship and  supporting  a  tradition. 

She  stayed  on  and  taught  arithmetic  for 
one  thing.  And  when  she  was  not  teach- 
ing arithmetic,  she  was  giving  little  dicta- 
tions, setting  little  themes,  controlling  some 
fifty  young  and  very  free  translators  of  Le 
Philosophc  sous  les  Toils.  Miss  Quincey 
had  a  passion  for  figures  and  for  everything 
that  could  be  expressed  in  figures.  Not  a 
pure  passion,  nothing  to  do  with  the  higher 
mathematics,  which  is  the  love  of  the  soul, 
but  an  affection  sadly  alloyed  with  baser 
matter,  with  rods  and  perches,  firkins  and 
hogsheads,  and  articles  out  of  the  grocer's 
shop. 

Among  these  objects  Miss  Quincey's 
imagination  ran  voluptuous  riot.  But  upon 
such  things  as  history  or  poetry  she  had 


6  Superseded 

a  somewhat  blighting  influence.  The  flow- 
ers in  the  school  Anthology  withered 
under  her  fingers,  and  the  flesh  and  blood 
of  heroes  crumbled  into  the  dust  of  dates. 
As  for  the  philosopher  under  the  roofs,  who 
he  was,  and  what  was  his  philosophy,  and 
how  he  ever  came  to  be  under  the  roofs 
at  all,  nobody  in  St.  Sidwell's  ever  knew 
or  ever  cared  to  know;  Miss  Quincey  had 
made  him  eternally  uninteresting.  Yet 
Miss  Quincey's  strength  was  in  her  limita- 
tions. It  was  the  strength  of  unreasoning 
but  undying  conviction.  Nothing  could 
shake  her  belief  in  the  supreme  importance 
of  arithmetic  and  the  majesty  of  its  ele- 
mentary rules.  Pale  and  persistent  and  in- 
tolerably meek,  she  hammered  hard  facts 
into  the  brain  with  a  sort  of  muffled  stroke, 
hammered  till  the  hardest  stuck  by  reason 
of  their  hardness,  for  she  was  a  teacher  of 
the  old  school.  Thus  in  her  own  way  she 
made  her  mark.  Among  the  other  cyphers, 
the  irrelevant  and  insignificant  figure  of  Miss 
Quincey  was  indelibly  engraved  on  many  an 


Miss  Quincey  Stops  the  Way     7 

immortal  soul.  There  was  a  curious  per- 
sistency about  Miss  Quincey. 

Miss  Quincey  was  not  exactly  popular. 
The  younger  teachers  pronounced  her  cut 
and  dried;  for  dryness,  conscientiously  ac- 
quired, passed  for  her  natural  condition. 
Nobody  knew  that  it  cost  her  much  effort 
and  industry  to  be  so  stiff  and  starched ;  that 
the  starch  had  to  be  put  on  fresh  every  morn- 
ing; that  it  was  quite  a  business  getting  up 
her  limp  little  personality  for  the  day.  In 
five-and-twenty  years,  owing  to  an  incurable 
malady  of  shyness,  she  had  never  made 
friends  with  any  of  her  pupils. 

Her  one  exception  proved  her  rule.  Miss 
Quincey  seemed  to  have  gone  out  of  her 
way  to  attract  that  odious  little  Laura  Laz- 
arus, who  was  known  at  St.  Sidwell's  as 
the  Mad  Hatter.  At  fourteen,  being  still 
incapable  of  adding  two  and  two  together, 
the  Mad  Hatter  had  been  told  off  into  an 
idiot's  class  by  herself  for  arithmetic;  and 
Miss  Quincey,  because  she  was  so  meek  and 
patient  and  persistent,  was  told  off  to  teach 


8  Superseded 

her.  The  child,  a  queer,  ugly  little  pariah, 
half-Jew,  half-Cockney,  held  all  other  girls 
in  abhorrence,  and  was  avoided  by  them  with 
an  equal  loathing.  She  seemed  to  have  at- 
tached herself  to  the  unpopular  teacher  out 
of  sheer  perversity  and  malignant  contempt 
of  public  opinion.  Abandoned  in  their 
corner,  with  their  heads  bent  together  over 
the  sums,  the  two  outsiders  clung  to  each 
other  in  a  common  misery  and  isolation. 

Miss  Quincey  was  well  aware  that  she  was 
of  no  account  at  St.  Sidwell's.  She  sup- 
posed that  it  was  because  she  had  never 
taken  her  degree.  To  be  sure  she  had  never 
tried  to  take  it;  but  it  was  by  no  means  cer- 
tain that  she  could  have  taken  it  if  she  had 
tried.  She  was  not  clever;  Louisa  had  car- 
ried off  all  the  brains  and  the  honours  of  the 
family.  It  had  been  considered  unnecessary 
for  Juliana  to  develop  an  individuality  of  her 
own;  enough  for  her  that  she  belonged  to 
Louisa,  and  was  known  as  Louisa's  sister. 
Louisa's  sister  was  a  part  of  Louisa;  Louisa 
was  a  part  of  St.  Sidwell's  College,  Regent's 


Miss  Quincey  Stops  the  Way      9 

Park;  and  St.  Sidwell's  College,  Regent's 
Park,  was  a  part — no,  St.  Sidwell's  was  the 
whole;  it  was  the  glorious  world.  Miss 
Quincey  had  never  seen,  or  even  desired  to 
see  any  other.  That  college  was  to  her  a 
place  of  exquisite  order  and  light.  Light 
that  was  filtered  through  the  high  tilted 
windows,  and  reflected  from  a  prevailing 
background  of  green  tiles  and  honey-white 
pine,  from  countless  rows  of  shining  desks 
and  from  hundreds  of  young  faces.  Light, 
the  light  of  ideas,  that  streamed  from  the 
platform  in  the  great  hall  where  three  times 
in  the  year  Miss  Cursiter  gave  her  address 
to  the  students  and  teachers  of  St.  Sidwell's. 
Now  Miss  Cursiter  was  a  pioneer  at  war 
with  the  past,  a  woman  of  vast  ambitions,  a 
woman  with  a  system  and  an  end;  and  she 
chose  her  instruments  finely,  toiling  early 
and  late  to  increase  their  brilliance  and  effi- 
ciency. She  was  new  to  St.  Sidwell's,  and 
would  have  liked  to  make  a  clean  sweep  of 
the  old  staff  and  to  fill  their  places  with 
women  like  Rhoda  Vivian,  young  and  mag- 


1 0  Superseded 

nificent  and  strong.  As  it  was,  she  had  been 
weeding  them  out  gradually,  as  opportunity 
arose;  and  the  new  staff,  modern  to  its 
finger-tips,  was  all  but  complete  and  perfect 
now.  Only  Miss  Quincey  remained.  St. 
Sidwell's  in  the  weeding  time  had  not  been 
a  bed  of  roses  for  Miss  Cursiter,  and  Miss 
Quincey,  blameless  but  incompetent,  was  a 
thorn  in  her  side,  a  thorn  that  stuck.  Im- 
possible to  remove  Miss  Quincey  quickly,  she 
was  so  very  blameless  and  she  worked  so 
hard. 

She  worked  from  nine  till  one  in  the  morn- 
ing, from  two-thirty  till  four-thirty  in  the 
afternoon,  and  from  six-thirty  in  the  evening 
till  any  hour  in  the  night.  She  worked  with 
the  desperate  zeal  of  the  superseded  who 
knows  that  she  holds  her  post  on  sufferance, 
the  terrified  tenacity  of  the  middle-aged  who 
feels  behind  her  the  swift- footed  rivalry  of 
youth.  And  the  more  she  worked  the  more 
she  annoyed  Miss  Cursiter. 

So  now,  above  all  the  tramping  and 
shuffling  and  hissing,  you  heard  the  self- 


Miss  Quincey  Stops  the  Way      1 1 

restrained  and  slightly  metallic  utterance  of 
the  Head. 

"Stand  back,  Miss  Quincey,  if  you 
please." 

And  Miss  Quincey  stood  back,  flattening 
herself  against  the  wall,  and  the  procession 
passed  her  by,  rosy,  resonant,  exulting,  a 
triumph  of  life. 


CHAPTER  II 
•fcousebolD  <3oDs 

PUNCTUALLY  at  four-thirty  Miss 
Quincey  vanished  from  the  light  of  St. 
Sidwell's,  Regent's  Park,  into  the  obscurity 
of  Camden  Town.  Camden  Town  is  full  of 
little  houses  standing  back  in  side  streets, 
houses  with  porticoed  front  doors  mon- 
strously disproportioned  to  their  size.  No- 
body ever  knocks  at  those  front  doors;  no- 
body ever  passes  down  those  side  streets  if 
they  can  possibly  help  it.  The  houses  are 
all  exactly  alike;  they  melt  and  merge  into 
each  other  in  dingy  perspective,  each  with  its 
slag-bordered  six  foot  of  garden  uttering  a 
faint  suburban  protest  against  the  advances 
of  the  pavement.  Miss  Quincey  lived  in 
half  of  one  of  them  (number  ninety,  Camden 
Street  North)  with  her  old  aunt  Mrs.  Moon 
and  their  old  servant  Martha.  She  had 

12 


1 3 

lived  there  five-and-twenty  years,  ever  since 
the  death  of  her  uncle. 

Tollington  Moon  had  been  what  his  fam- 
ily called  unfortunate;  that  is  to  say,  he 
had  mislaid  the  greater  portion  of  his  wife's 
money  and  the  whole  of  Juliana's  and 
Louisa's;  he,  poor  fellow,  had  none  of  his 
own  to  lose.  Uncle  Tollington,  being  the 
only  male  representative  of  the  family,  had 
been  appointed  to  drive  the  family  coach. 
He  was  a  genial  good-natured  fellow  and  he 
cheerfully  agreed,  declaring  that  there  was 
nothing  in  the  world  he  liked  better  than 
driving;  though  indeed  he  had  had  but  little 
practice  in  the  art.  So  they  started  with  a 
splendid  flourishing  of  whips  and  blowing  of 
horns;  Tollington  driving  at  a  furious  break- 
neck pace  in  a  manner  highly  diverting  and 
exhilarating  to  the  ladies  inside.  The  girls 
(they  were  girls  in  those  days)  sat  tight  and 
felt  no  fear,  while  Mrs.  Moon,  with  her  teeth 
shaking,  explained  to  them  the  advantages 
of  having  so  expert  a  driver  on  the  box  seat. 
Of  course  there  came  the  inevitable  smash 


1 4  Superseded 

at  the  comer.  The  three  climbed  out  of  that 
coach  more  dead  than  alive;  but  they  uttered 
no  complaints;  they  had  had  their  fun;  and 
in  accidents  of  this  kind  the  poor  driver  gen- 
erally gets  the  worst  of  it. 

Mrs.  Moon  at  any  rate  found  consolation 
in  disaster  by  steadily  ignoring  its  most  hu- 
miliating features.  Secure  in  the  new  maj- 
esty of  her  widowhood,  she  faced  her  nieces 
with  an  unflinching  air  and  demanded  of 
them  eternal  belief  in  the  wisdom  and  recti- 
tude of  their  uncle  Tollington.  She  hoped 
that  they  would  never  forget  him,  never  for- 
get what  he  had  to  bear,  never  forget  all 
he  had  done  for  them.  Her  attitude  re- 
duced Juliana  to  tears;  in  Louisa  it  roused 
the  instinct  of  revolt,  and  Louisa  was  for 
separating  from  Mrs.  Moon.  It  was  then, 
in  her  first  difference  from  Louisa,  that  Miss 
Quincey's  tender  and  foolish  little  face  ac- 
quired its  strangely  persistent  air.  Hitherto 
the  elder  had  served  the  younger;  now  she 
took  her  stand.  She  said,  "Whatever  we 
do,  we  must  keep  together";  and  she  pro- 


Household  Gods  i  c 

•  "J 

fessed  her  willingness  to  believe  in  her 
uncle  Tollington  and  remember  him  for 
ever. 

To  this  Louisa,  who  prided  herself  on 
speaking  the  truth  or  at  any  rate  her  mind, 
replied  that  she  wasn't  likely  to  forget  him  in 
a  hurry;  that  her  uncle  Tollington  had 
ruined  her  life,  and  she  did  not  want  to  be 
reminded  of  him  any  more  than  she  could 
help.  Moreover,  she  found  her  aunt  Moon's 
society  depressing.  She  meant  to  get  on 
and  be  independent;  and  she  advised  Juliana 
to  do  the  same. 

Juliana  did  not  press  the  point,  for  it  was 
a  delicate  one,  seeing  that  Louisa  was  earn- 
ing a  hundred  and  twenty  pounds  a  year 
and  she  but  eighty.  So  she  added  her 
eighty  pounds  to  her  aunt's  eighty  and  went 
to  live  with  her  in  Camden  Street  North, 
while  Louisa  shrugged  her  shoulders 
and  carried  herself  and  her  salary  else- 
where. 

There  was  very  little  room  for  Mrs.  Moon 
and  Juliana  at  number  ninety.  The  poor 


1 6  Superseded 

souls  had  crowded  themselves  out  with  relics 
of  their  past,  a  pathetic  salvage,  dragged 
hap-hazard  from  the  wreck  in  the  first  frenzy 
of  preservation.  Dreadful  things  in  marble 
and  gilt  and  in  papier-mache  inlaid  with 
mother-o'-pearl,  rickety  work  tables  with 
pouches  underneath  them,  banner-screens  in 
silk  and  footstools  in  Berlin  wool-work 
fought  with  each  other  and  with  Juliana  for 
standing-room.  For  Juliana,  with  her 
genius  for  collision,  was  always  knocking 
up  against  them,  always  getting  in  their  way. 
In  return,  Juliana's  place  at  an  oblique  angle 
of  the  fireside  was  disputed  by  a  truculent 
cabinet  with  bandy  legs.  There  was  a  never- 
ending  quarrel  between  Juliana  and  that 
piece  of  furniture,  in  which  Mrs.  Moon  took 
the  part  of  the  furniture.  Her  own  world 
had  shrunk  to  a  square  yard  between  the 
window  and  the  fire.  There  she  sat  and 
dreamed  among  her  household  gods,  smil- 
ing now  and  then  under  the  spell  of  the 
dream,  or  watched  her  companion  with  criti- 
ral  disapproval.  She  had  accepted  Juliana's 


Household  Gods  17 

devotion  as  a  proper  sacrifice  to  the  gods; 
but  for  Juliana,  or  Louisa  for  the  matter 
of  that,  she  seemed  to  have  but  little  affec- 
tion. If  anything  Louisa  was  her  favourite. 
Louisa  was  better  company,  to  begin  with; 
and  Louisa,  with  her  cleverness  and  her 
salary  and  her  general  air  of  indifference 
and  prosperity,  raised  no  questions.  Be- 
sides, Louisa  was  married. 

But  Juliana,  toiling  from  morning  till 
night  for  her  eighty  pounds  a  year;  Juliana, 
painful  and  persistent,  growing  into  middle- 
age  without  a  hope,  Juliana  was  an  incarnate 
reproach,  a  perpetual  monument  to  the  folly 
of  Tollington  Moon.  Juliana  disturbed  her 
dream. 

But  nobody  else  disturbed  it,  for  nobody 
ever  came  to  their  half  of  the  house  in  Cam- 
den  Street  North.  Louisa  used  to  come  and 
go  in  a  brief  perfunctory  manner;  but 
Louisa  had  married  the  Greek  professor  and 
gone  away  for  good,  and  her  friends  at  St. 
Sidwell's  were  not  likely  to  waste  their  time 
in  cultivating  Juliana  and  Mrs.  Moon.  The 


1 8  Superseded 

thing  had  been  tried  by  one  or  two  of  the 
younger  teachers  who  went  in  for  all-round 
self-development  ancl  were  getting  up  the 
minor  virtues.  But  they  had  met  with  no 
encouragement  and  they  had  ceased  to  come. 
Then  nobody  came;  not  even  the  doctor  or 
the  clergyman.  The  two  ladies  were  of  one 
mind  on  that  point;  it  was  convenient  for 
them  to  ignore  their  trifling  ailments,  spirit- 
ual or  bodily.  And  as  soon  as  they  saw  that 
the  world  renounced  them  they  adopted  a 
lofty  tone  and  said  to  each  other  that  they 
had  renounced  the  world.  For  they  were 
proud,  Mrs.  Moon  especially  so.  Tolling- 
ton  Moon  had  married  slightly,  ever  so 
slightly  beneath  him,  the  Moons  again  mark- 
ing a  faint  descent  from  the  standing  of  the 
Quinceys.  But  the  old  lady  had  completely 
identified  herself,  not  only  with  the  Moons, 
but  with  the  higher  branch,  which  she  always 
spoke  of  as  "my  family."  In  fact  she  had 
worn  her  connection  with  the  Quinceys  as  a 
feather  in  her  cap  so  long  that  the  feather 
had  grown,  as  it  were,  into  an  entire  bird 


Household  Gods  19 

of  paradise.  And  once  a  bird  of  paradise, 
always  a  bird  of  paradise,  though  it  had 
turned  on  the  world  a  somewhat  dilapidated 
tail. 

So  the  two  lived  on  together;  so  they  had 
always  lived.  Mrs.  Moon  was  an  old 
woman  before  she  was  five-and-fif ty ;  and 
before  she  was  five-and-twenty  Juliana's 
youth  had  withered  away  in  the  sour  and 
sordid  atmosphere  born  of  perishing  gen- 
tility and  acrid  personal  remark.  And  their 
household  gods  looked  down  on  them,  mini- 
atures and  silhouettes  of  Moons  and  Quin- 
ceys,  calm  and  somewhat  contemptuous  pres- 
ences. From  the  post  of  honour  above  the 
mantelshelf,  Tollington,  attired  as  an  Early 
Victorian  dandy,  splendid  in  velvet  waist- 
coat, scarf  and  chain-pin,  leaned  on  a  broken 
column  symbolical  of  his  fortunes,  and 
smiled  genially  on  the  ruin  he  had 
made. 

That  was  how  Miss  Quincey  came  to  St. 
Sidwell's.  And  now  she  was  five-and-forty; 
she  had  always  been  five-and-forty;  that  is 


26  Superseded 

to  say,  she  had  never  been  young,  for  to  be 
young  you  must  be  happy.  And  this  was 
so  far  an  advantage,  that  when  middle-age 
came  on  her  she  felt  no  difference. 


CHAPTER  III 
flnaugural  Stresses 

IT  was  evening,  early  in  the  winter  term, 
and  Miss  Cursiter  was  giving  her  usual 
inaugural  address  to  the  staff.  Their  num- 
ber had  increased  so  considerably  that  the 
little  class-room  was  packed  to  overflowing. 
Miss  Cursiter  stood  in  the  free  space  at  the 
end,  facing  six  rows  of  eager  faces  arranged 
in  the  form  of  a  horse-shoe.  She  looked 
upon  them  and  smiled;  she  joyed  with  the 
joy  of  the  creator  who  sees  his  idea  incarnate 
before  him. 

A  striking  figure,  Miss  Cursiter.  Tall, 
academic  and  austere;  a  keen  eagle  head 
crowned  with  a  mass  of  iron-grey  hair;  grey- 
black  eyes  burning  under  a  brow  of  ashen 
grey ;  an  intelligence  fervent  with  fire  of  the 
enthusiast,  cold  with  the  renunciant's  frost. 
Such  was  Miss  Cursiter.  She  was  in  splen- 

21 


22  Superseded 

did  force  to-day,  grappling  like  an  athlete 
with  her  enormous  theme — "The  Educa- 
tional Advantages  of  General  Culture."  She 
delivered  her  address  with  an  utterance  rapid 
but  distinct,  keeping  one  eye  on  the  reporter 
and  the  other  on  Miss  Rhoda  Vivian, 
M.A. 

She  might  well  look  to  Rhoda  Vivian.  If 
she  had  needed  a  foil  for  her  own  command- 
ing personality,  she  had  found  it  there.  But 
the  new  Classical  Mistress  was  something 
more  than  Miss  Cursiter's  complement.  Na- 
ture, usually  so  economical,  not  to  say  parsi- 
monious, seemed  to  have  made  her  for  her 
own  delight,  in  a  fit  of  reckless  extravagance. 
She  had  given  her  a  brilliant  and  efficient 
mind  in  a  still  more  brilliant  and  efficient 
body,  clothed  her  in  all  the  colours  of  life; 
made  her  a  creature  of  ardent  and  elemental 
beauty.  Rhoda  Vivian  had  brown  hair  with 
sparkles  of  gold  in  it  and  flakes  of  red  fire; 
her  eyes  were  liquid  grey,  the  grey  of  water; 
her  lips  were  full,  and  they  pouted  a  little 
proudly;  it  was  the  pride  of  life.  And  she 


Inaugural  Addresses  23 

had  other  gifts  which  did  not  yet  appear  at 
St.  Sidwell's.  There  was  something  about 
her  still  plastic  and  unformed;  you  could 
not  say  whether  it  was  the  youth  of  genius, 
or  only  the  genius  of  youth.  But  at  three- 
and-twenty  she  had  chosen  her  path,  and 
gone  far  on  it,  and  it  had  been  honours  all 
the  way.  She  went  up  and  down  at  St.  Sid- 
well's,  adored  and  unadoring,  kindling  the 
fire  of  a  secret  worship.  In  any  other  place, 
with  any  other  woman  at  the  head  of  it,  such 
a  vivid  individuality  might  have  proved  fatal 
to  her  progress.  But  Miss  Cursiter  was  too 
original  herself  not  to  perceive  the  fine  uses 
of  originality.  All  her  hopes  for  the  future 
were  centred  in  Rhoda  Vivian.  She  looked 
below  that  brilliant  surface  and  saw  in  her 
the  ideal  leader  of  young  womanhood. 
Rhoda  was  a  force  that  could  strike  fire  from 
a  stone;  what  she  wanted  she  was  certain 
to  get;  she  seemed  to  compel  work  from  the 
laziest  and  intelligence  from  the  dullest  by 
the  mere  word  of  her  will.  What  was  more, 
her  nature  was  too  large  for  vanity;  she 


24  Superseded 

held  her  worshippers  at  arm's  length  and 
consecrated  her  power  of  personal  seduction 
to  strictly  intellectual  ends.  At  the  end  of 
her  first  term  her  position  was  second  only 
to  the  Head.  If  Miss  Cursiter  was  the  will 
and  intelligence  of  St.  Sidwell's,  Rhoda 
Vivian  was  its  subtle  poetry  and  its  soul. 
And  Miss  Cursiter  meant  to  keep  her  there; 
being  a  woman  who  made  all  sacrifices  and 
demanded  them. 

So  now,  while  Miss  Cursiter  stood  ex- 
plaining, ostensibly  to  the  entire  staff,  the 
unique  advantages  of  General  Culture,  it  was 
to  Rhoda  Vivian  as  to  a  supreme  audience 
that  she  addressed  her  deeper  thought  and 
her  finer  phrase.  If  Miss  Cursiter  had  not 
had  to  consult  her  notes  now  and  again,  she 
must  have  seen  that  Rhoda  Vivian's  mind 
was  wandering,  that  the  Classical  Mistress 
was  if  anything  more  interested  in  her  com- 
panions than  in  the  noble  utterances  of  the 
Head.  As  her  grey  eyes  swept  the  tiers  of 
faces,  they  lingered  on  that  comer  where 
Miss  Quincey  seemed  perpetually  striving  to 


Inaugural  Addresses  25 

suppress,  consume,  and  utterly  obliterate 
herself.  And  each  time  she  smiled,  as  she 
had  smiled  earlier  in  the  day  when  first  she 
saw  Miss  Quincey. 

For  Miss  Quincey  was  there,  far  back  in 
the  ranks  of  the  brilliant  and  efficient.  Note- 
book on  desk,  she  followed  the  quick  march 
of  thought  with  a  fatigued  and  stumbling 
brain.  She  was  painfully,  ludicrously  out 
of  step;  yet  to  judge  by  the  light  that  shone 
now  and  then  in  her  eyes,  by  the  smile  that 
played  about  the  corners  of  her  weak,  tender 
mouth,  she  too  had  caught  the  sympathetic 
rapture,  the  intellectual  thrill.  Ready  to 
drop  was  Miss  Quincey,  but  she  would  not 
have  missed  that  illuminating  hour,  not  if 
you  had  paid  her — three  times  her  salary. 
It  was  her  one  glimpse  of  the  larger  life; 
her  one  point  of  contact  with  the  ideal.  Her 
pencil  staggered  over  her  note-book  as  Miss 
Cursiter  flamed  and  lightened  in  her  per- 
oration. 

"We  have  looked  at  our  subject  in  the 
light  of  the  ideals  by  which  and  for  which 


26  Superseded 

we  live.  Let  us  now  turn  to  the  practical 
side  of  the  matter,  as  it  touches  our  business 
and  our  bosoms.  Do  not  say  we  have  no 
room  for  poetry  in  our  crowded  days."  A 
score  of  weary  heads  looked  up;  there  was 
a  vague  inquiry  in  all  eyes.  "You  have 
your  evenings — all  of  you.  Much  can  be 
done  with  evenings;  if  your  training  has 
done  nothing  else  for  you  it  has  taught  you 
the  economy  of  time.  You  are  tired  in  the 
evenings,  yes.  But  the  poets,  Shakespeare, 
Tennyson,  and  Browning,  are  the  great  heal- 
ers and  regenerators  of  worn-out  humanity. 
When  you  are  faint  and  weary  with  your 
day's  work,  the  best  thing  you  can  do  is  to 
rise  and  refresh  yourselves  at  the  living  wells 
of  literature." 

Long  before  the  closing  sentence  Miss 
Quincey's  MS.  had  become  a  sightless  blur. 
But  she  had  managed  to  jot  down  in  her 
neat  arithmetical  way :  "Poets  =  healers  and 
regenerators." 

The  address  was  printed  and  a  copy  was 
given  to  each  member  of  the  staff.  Miss 


Inaugural  Addresses  27 

Quincey  treasured  up  hers  as  a  priceless 
scripture. 

Miss  Quincey  was  aware  of  her  short- 
comings and  had  struggled  hard  to  mend 
them,  toiling  pantingly  after  those  younger 
ones  who  had  attained  the  standard  of  bril- 
liance and  efficiency.  She  joined  the  Teach- 
ers' Debating  Society.  Not  that  she  de- 
bated. She  had  once  put  some  elementary 
questions  in  an  inaudible  voice,  and  had 
been  requested  to  speak  a  little  louder, 
whereupon  she  sank  into  her  seat  and  spoke 
no  more.  But  she  heard  a  great  deal. 
About  the  emancipation  of  women;  about 
the  women's  labour  market ;  about  the  doors 
that  were  now  thrown  open  to  women.  She 
was  told  that  all  they  wanted  was  a  fair  field 
and  no  favour.  (The  speaker,  a  rosy- 
cheeked  child  of  one-and-twenty,  was  quite 
violent  in  her  repudiation  of  favour.)  And 
Miss  Quincey  believed  it  all,  though  she 
understood  very  little  about  it. 

But  it  was  illumination,  a  new  gospel  to 
her,  .this  doctrine  of  General  Culture;  it  was 


28  Superseded 

the  large  easy-fitting  formula  which  she  had 
seemed  to  need.  With  touching  simplicity 
she  determined  to  follow  the  course  recom- 
mended by  the  Head.  Though  by  the  time 
she  had  corrected  some  seventy  manuscripts 
in  marble-backed  covers,  and  prepared  her 
lesson  for  the  next  day,  she  had  nothing  but 
the  fag-end  of  her  brain  to  give  to  the  heal- 
ers and  regenerators;  as  for  rising,  Miss 
Ouincey  felt  much  more  like  going  to  bed, 
and  it  was  as  much  as  she  could  do  to  drag 
her  poor  little  body  there.  Still  Miss  Quin- 
cey  was  nothing  if  not  heroic;  night  after 
night  twelve  o'clock  would  find  her  painfully 
trying  to  draw  water  from  the  wells  of  litera- 
ture. She  had  begun  upon  Browning;  set 
herself  to  read  through  the  whole  of  Sordello 
from  beginning  to  end.  It  is  as  easy  as  a 
sum  in  arithmetic  if  you  don't  bother  your 
head  too  much  about  the  Guelphs  and  Ghi- 
bellines  and  the  metaphors  and  things,  and 
if  you  take  it  in  short  fits,  say  three  pages 
every  evening.  Never  any  more,  or  you 
might  go  to  sleep  and  forget  all  about  it; 


Inaugural  Addresses  29 

never  any  less,  or  you  would  have  bad  ar- 
rears. As  there  are  exactly  two  hundred 
and  thirteen  pages,  she  calculated  that  she 
would  finish  it  in  ten  weeks  and  a  day. 
There  was  no  place  for  Miss  Quincey  and 
her  pile  of  marble-backed  exercise-books  in 
the  dim  and  dingy  first-floor  drawing-room 
(Mrs.  Moon  and  the  bandy-legged  cabinet 
would  have  had  something  to  say  to  that). 
All  this  terrific  intellectual  travail  went  on 
in  a  dimmer  and  dingier  dining-room  be- 
neath it. 

Then  one  night,  old  Martha,  disturbed  by 
sounds  that  came  from  Miss  Juliana's  bed- 
room, groped  her  way  fumblingly  in  and 
found  Miss  Juliana  sitting  up  in  her  sleep 
and  posing  the  darkness  with  a  problem. 

"If,"  said  Miss  Juliana,  "three  men  can 
finish  one  hundred  and  nineteen  hogsheads 
of  Browning  in  eight  weeks,  how  long  will 
it  take  seven  women  to  finish  a  thousand 
and  forty-five — forty-five — forty-five,  if  one 
woman  works  twice  as  hard  as  eleven  men?" 

Martha  shook  her  head  and  went  fum- 


30  Superseded 

bling  back  to  bed  again;  and  being  a  con- 
scientious servant  she  said  nothing  about  it 
for  fear  of  frightening  the  old  lady. 

About  a  fortnight  later,  Rhoda  Vivian, 
sailing  down  the  corridor,  came  upon  the 
little  arithmetic  teacher  all  sick  and  tremu- 
lous, leaning  up  against  the  hot-water  pipes 
beside  a  pile  of  exercise-books.  The  sweat 
streamed  from  her  sallow  forehead,  and  her 
face  was  white  and  drawn.  She  could  give 
no  rational  account  of  herself,  but  offered 
two  hypotheses  as  equally  satisfactory; 
either  she  had  taken  a  bad  chill,  or  else  the 
hot  air  from  the  water-pipes  had  turned  her 
faint.  Rhoda  picked  up  the  pile  of  exercise- 
books  and  led  her  into  the  dressing-room, 
and  Miss  Quincey  was  docile  and  ridicu- 
lously grateful.  She  was  glad  that  Miss 
Vivian  was  going  to  take  her  home.  She 
even  smiled  her  little  pinched  smile  and 
pressed  Rhoda's  hand  as  she  said,  "A  friend 
in  need  is  a  friend  indeed."  Rhoda  would 
have  given  anything  to  be  able  to  return  the 
pressure  and  the  sentiment,  but  Rhoda  was 


Inaugural  Addresses  31 

too  desperately  sincere.  She  was  sorry  for 
Miss  Quincey;  but  all  her  youth,  unfettered 
and  unfeeling,  revolted  from  the  bond  of 
friendship.  So  she  only  stooped  and  laced 
up  the  shabby  boots,  and  fastened  the  thin 
cape  by  its  solitary  button.  The  touch  of 
Miss  Quincey's  clothes  thrilled  her  with  a 
pang  of  pity,  and  she  could  have  wept  over 
the  unutterable  pathos  of  her  hat.  In  form 
and  substance  it  was  a  rock,  beaten  by  the 
weather;  its  limp  ribbons  clung  to  it  like 
seaweed  washed  up  and  abandoned  by  the 
tide.  When  Miss  Quincey's  head  was  in- 
side it  the  hat  seemed  to  become  one  with 
Miss  Quincey;  you  could  not  conceive  any- 
thing more  melancholy  and  forlorn.  Rhoda 
was  beautifully  attired  in  pale  grey  cloth. 
Rhoda  wore  golden  sables  about  her  throat, 
and  a  big  black  Gainsborough  hat  on  the 
top  of  her  head,  a  hat  that  Miss  Quincey 
would  have  thought  a  little  daring  and  the- 
atrical on  anybody  else;  but  Rhoda  wore  it 
and  looked  like  a  Puritan  princess.  Rhoda's 
clothes  were  enough  to  show  that  she  was  a 


32  Superseded 

woman  for  whom  a  profession  is  a  super- 
fluity, a  luxury. 

Rhoda  sent  for  a  hansom,  and  having 
left  Miss  Quincey  at  her  home  went  off  in 
search  of  a  doctor.  She  had  insisted  on  a 
doctor,  in  spite  of  Miss  Quincey's  protesta- 
tions. After  exploring  a  dozen  dingy  streets 
and  conceiving  a  deep  disgust  for  Camden 
Town,  she  walked  back  to  find  her  man  in 
the  neighbourhood  of  St.  Sidwell's. 


CHAPTER  IV 
JBastian  Cautleg,  /IB.  D. 

IT  was  half-past  five  and  Dr.  Bastian 
Cautley  had  put  on  his  house  jacket, 
loosened  his  waistcoat,  settled  down  by  his 
library  fire  with  a  pipe  and  a  book,  and  was 
thanking  Heaven  that  for  once  he  had  an 
hour  to  himself  between  his  afternoon  round 
and  his  time  for  consultation.  He  had  been 
working  hard  ever  since  nine  o'clock  in  the 
morning;  but  now  nobody  could  have  looked 
more  superlatively  lazy  than  Bastian  Cautley 
as  he  stretched  himself  on  two  armchairs  in 
an  attitude  of  reckless  ease.  His  very  in- 
tellect (the  most  unrestful  part  of  him)  was 
at  rest;  all  his  weary  being  merged  in  a  con- 
fused voluptuous  sensation,  a  beatific  state 
in  which  smoking  became  a  higher  kind  of 
thinking,  and  thought  betrayed  an  increas- 
ing tendency  to  end  in  smoke.  The  room 
33 


34  Superseded 

was  double-walled  with  book-shelves,  and 
but  for  the  far  away  underground  humming 
of  a  happy  maidservant  the  house  was 
soundless.  He  rejoiced  to  think  that  there 
was  not  a  soul  in  it  above  stairs  to  disturb 
his  deep  tranquillity.  At  six  o'clock  he 
would  have  to  take  his  legs  off  that  chair, 
and  get  into  a  frock-coat;  once  in  the  frock- 
coat  he  would  become  another  man,  all  pa- 
tience and  politeness.  After  six  there  would 
be  no  pipe  and  no  peace  for  him,  but  the 
knocking  and  ringing  at  his  front  door 
would  go  on  incessantly  till  seven-thirty. 
There  was  flattery  in  every  knock,  for  it 
meant  that  Dr.  Cautley  was  growing  emi- 
nent, and  that  at  the  ridiculously  early  age 
of  nine-and-twenty. 

There  was  a  sharp  ring  now.  He  turned 
wearily  in  his  chairs. 

"There's  another  damned  patient,"  said 
Dr.  Cautley. 

He  was  really  so  eminent  that  he  could 
afford  to  think  blasphemously  of  patients; 
and  he  had  no  love  for  those  who  came  to 


Bastian  Cautley,  M.  D.        3$ 

consult  him  before  their  time.  He  sat  up 
with  his  irritable  nerves  on  edge.  The  serv- 
ant was  certainly  letting  somebody  in,  and 
from  the  soft  rustling  sounds  in  the  hall 
he  gathered  that  somebody  was  a  woman; 
much  patience  and  much  politeness  would 
then  be  required  of  him,  and  he  was  feeling 
anything  but  patient  and  polite. 

"Miss  Rhoda  Vivian"  was  the  name  on 
the  card  that  was  brought  to  him.  He  did 
not  know  Miss  Rhoda  Vivian. 

The  gas-jets  were  turned  low  in  the  con- 
sulting-room; when  he  raised  them  he  saw  a 
beautiful  woman  standing  by  the  fire  in  an 
attitude  of  impatience.  He  had  kept  her 
waiting;  and  it  seemed  that  this  adorable 
person  knew  the  value  of  time.  She  was 
not  going  to  waste  words  either.  As  it  was 
impossible  to  associate  her  with  the  ordinary 
business  of  the  place,  he  was  prepared  for 
her  terse  and  lucid  statement  of  somebody 
else's  case.  He  said  he  would  look  round 
early  in  the  morning  (Miss  Vivian  looked 
dissatisfied) ;  or  perhaps  that  evening  (Miss 


36  Superseded 

Vivian  was  dubious) ;  or  possibly  at  once 
(Miss  Vivian  smiled  in  hurried  approval). 
She  was  eager  to  be  gone.  And  when  she 
had  gone  he  stood  deliberating.  Miss  Quin- 
cey  was  a  pathological  abstraction,  Miss  Viv- 
ian was  a  radiant  reality;  it  was  clear  that 
Miss  Ouincey  was  not  urgent,  and  that  once 
safe  in  her  bed  she  could  very  well  wait  till 
to-morrow;  but  when  he  thought  of  Miss 
Vivian  he  became  impressed  with  the  gravity 
and  interest  of  Miss  Quincey's  case. 

While  the  doctor  was  making  up  his  mind, 
little  Miss  Quincey,  in  her  shabby  back  bed- 
room, lay  waiting  for  him,  trembling,  fret- 
ting her  nerves  into  a  fever,  starting  at 
imaginary  footsteps,  and  entertaining  all 
kinds  of  dismal  possibilities.  She  was  con- 
vinced that  she  was  going  to  die,  or  worse 
still,  to  break  down,  to  be  a  perpetual  in- 
valid. She  thought  of  several  likely  ill- 
nesses, beginning  with  general  paralysis  and 
ending  with  anaemia  of  the  brain.  It  might 
be  anaemia  of  the  brain,  but  she  rather 
thought  it  would  be  general  paralysis,  be- 


Bastian  Cautley,  M.  D.         37 

cause  this  would  be  so  much  the  more  dis- 
agreeable of  the  two.  Anyhow  Rhoda  Viv- 
ian must  have  thought  she  was  pretty  bad  or 
she  would  not  have  called  in  a  doctor.  To 
call  in  a  doctor  seemed  to  Miss  Quincey  next 
door  to  invoking  Providence  itself;  it  was 
the  final  desperate  resort,  implying  catas- 
trophe and  the  end  of  all  things.  Oh,  dear ! 
Miss  Quincey  wished  he  would  come  up  if 
he  was  coming,  and  get  it  over. 

After  all  he  did  not  keep  her  waiting  long, 
and  it  was  over  in  five  minutes.  And  yet  it 
was  amazing  the  amount  of  observation,  and 
insight,  and  solid  concentrated  thought  the 
young  man  contrived  to  pack  into  those  five 
minutes. 

Well — it  seemed  that  it  was  not  general 
paralysis  this  time,  nor  yet  anaemia  of  the 
brain ;  but  he  could  tell  her  more  about  it  in 
the  morning.  Meanwhile  she  had  nothing 
to  do  but  to  do  what  he  told  her  and  stay 
where  she  was  till  he  saw  her  again.  And 
he  was  gone  before  she  realized  that  he  had 
been  there. 


38  Superseded 

Again  ?  So  he  was  coming  again,  was 
he?  Miss  Quincey  did  not  know  whether 
to  be  glad  or  sorry.  His  presence  had  given 
her  a  rare  and  curiously  agreeable  sense  of 
protection,  but  she  had  to  think  of  the  ex- 
pense. She  had  to  think  too  of  what  Mrs. 
Moon  would  say  to  it — of  what  she  would 
say  to  him. 

Mrs.  Moon  had  a  good  deal  to  say  to  it. 
She  took  Juliana's  illness  as  a  personal  af- 
front, as  a  deliberate  back-handed  blow 
struck  at  the  memory  of  Tollington  Moon. 
With  all  the  base  implications  of  her  daily 
acts,  Juliana  had  never  attempted  anything 
like  this. 

"Capers  and  nonsense,"  she  said,  "Juliana 
has  never  had  an  illness  in  her  life." 

She  said  it  to  Rhoda  Vivian,  the  bold 
young  person  who  had  taken  upon  herself 
to  bring  the  doctor  into  the  house.  Mrs. 
Moon  spoke  of  the  doctor  as  if  he  was  a 
disease. 

Fortunately  Miss  Vivian  was  by  when  he 
endured  the  first  terrifying  encounter.  Her 


Bastian  Cautley,  M.  D.         39 

manner  suggested  that  she  took  him  under 
her  protection,  stood  between  him  and  some 
unfathomable  hostility. 

He  found  the  Old  Lady  disentangling  her- 
self with  immense  dignity  from  her  maze  of 
furniture.  Mrs.  Moon  was  a  small  woman 
shrunk  with  her  eighty  years,  shrunk  almost 
to  extinction  in  her  black  woollen  gown  and 
black  woollen  mittens.  Her  very  face 
seemed  to  be  vanishing  under  the  immense 
shadow  of  her  black  net  cap.  Spirals  of  thin 
grey  hair  stuck  flat  to  her  forehead;  she 
wore  other  and  similar  spirals  enclosed  be- 
hind glass  in  an  enormous  brooch;  it  was  the 
hair  of  her  ancestors,  that  is  to  say  of  the 
Quinceys.  As  the  Old  Lady  looked  at  Caut- 
ley her  little  black  eyes  burned  like  pin- 
points pierced  in  a  paste-board  mask. 

"I  think  you've  been  brought  here  on  a 
wild  goose  chase,  doctor,"  said  she,  "there 
is  nothing  the  matter  with  my  niece." 

He  replied  (battling  sternly  with  his  de- 
sire to  laugh)  that  he  would  be  delighted 
if  it  were  so;  adding  that  a  wild  goose 


40  Superseded 

chase  was  the  sport  he  preferred  to  any 
other. 

Here  he  looked  at  Miss  Vivian  to  the 
imminent  peril  of  his  self-control.  Mrs. 
Moon's  gaze  had  embraced  them  in  a  com- 
mon condemnation,  and  the  subtle  sympathy 
of  their  youth  linked  them  closer  and  made 
them  one  in  their  intimate  appreciation  of 
her. 

"Then  you  must  be  a  very  singular  young 
man.  I  thought  you  doctors  were  never 
happy  until  you'd  found  some  mare's  nest 
in  people's  constitutions  ?  You'd  much  bet- 
ter let  well  alone." 

"Miss  Quincey  is  very  far  from  well," 
said  Cautley  with  recovered  gravity,  "and 
I  rather  fancy  she  has  been  let  alone  too 
long." 

Cautley  thought  that  he  had  said  quite 
enough  to  alarm  any  old  lady.  And  indeed 
Mrs.  Moon  was  slowly  taking  in  the  idea  of 
disaster,  and  it  sent  her  poor  wits  wandering 
in  the  past.  Her  voice  sank  suddenly  from 
grating  antagonism  to  pensive  garrulity. 


Bastian  Cautley,  M.  D.         41 

"I've  no  faith  in  medicine,"  she  quavered, 
"nor  in  medical  men  either.  Though  to  be 
sure  my  husband  had  a  brother-in-law  once 
on  his  wife's  side,  Dr.  Quincey,  Dr.  Arnold 
Quincey,  Juliana's  father  and  Louisa's.  He 
was  a  medical  man.  He  wrote  a  book,  I 
daresay  you've  heard  of  it;  Quincey  on  Dis- 
eases of  the  Heart  it  was.  But  he's  dead 
now,  of  one  of  'em,  poor  man.  We  haven't 
seen  a  doctor  for  five-and-twenty  years." 

"Then  isn't  it  almost  time  that  you  should 
see  one  now  ?"  said  he,  cheerfully  taking  his 
leave.  "I  shall  look  round  again  in  the 
morning." 

He  looked  round  again  in  the  morning 
and  sat  half  an  hour  with  Miss  Quincey;  so 
she  had  time  to  take  a  good  look  at  him. 

He  was  very  nice  to  look  at,  this  young 
man.  He  was  so  clean-cut  and  tall  and  mus- 
cular; he  had  such  an  intellectual  forehead; 
his  mouth  was  so  firm,  you  could  trust  it  to 
tell  no  secrets;  and  his  eyes  (they  were  dark 
and  deep  set)  looked  as  if  they  saw  nothing 
but  Miss  Quincey.  Indeed,  at  the  moment 


42  Superseded 

he  had  forgotten  all  about  Rhoda  Vivian, 
and  did  see  nothing  but  the  little  figure  in 
the  bed  looking  more  like  a  rather  worn  and 
wizened  child  than  a  middle-aged  woman. 
He  was  very  gentle  and  sympathetic;  but  for 
that  his  youth  would  have  been  terrible  to 
her.  As  it  was,  Miss  Quincey  felt  a  little 
bit  in  awe  of  this  clever  doctor,  who  in  spite 
of  his  cleverness  looked  so  young,  and  not 
only  so  young  but  so  formidably  fastidious 
and  refined.  She  had  not  expected  him  to 
look  like  that.  All  the  clever  young  men 
she  had  met  had  displayed  a  noble  contempt 
for  appearances.  To  be  sure,  Miss  Quin- 
cey knew  but  little  of  the  world  of  men ;  for 
at  St.  Sidwell's  the  types  were  limited  to  three 
little  eccentric  professors,  and  the  plaster 
gods  in  the  art  studio.  But  for  the  gods  she 
might  just  as  well  have  lived  in  a  nunnery, 
for  whenever  Miss  Quincey  thought  of  a 
man  she  thought  of  something  like  Louisa's 
husband,  Andrew  Mackinnon,  who  spoke 
with  a  strong  Scotch  accent,  and  wore  flan- 
nel shirts  with  celluloid  collars,  and  coats 


Bastian  Cautley,  M.  D.        43 

that  hung  about  him  all  anyhow.  But  Dr. 
Cautley  was  not  in  the  least  like  Andrew 
Mackinnon.  He  had  a  distinguished  voice; 
his  clothes  fitted  him  to  perfection;  and  his 
linen,  irreproachable  itself,  reproved  her 
silently. 

Her  eyes  left  him  suddenly  and  wandered 
about  the  room.  She  was  full  of  little  trem- 
ors and  agitations;  she  wished  that  the 
towels  wouldn't  look  so  much  like  dish- 
cloths; she  credited  him  with  powers  of 
microscopic  observation,  and  wondered  if  he 
had  noticed  the  stain  on  the  carpet  and  the 
dust  on  the  book-shelves,  and  if  he  would  be 
likely  to  mistake  the  quinine  tabloids  for 
vulgar  liver  pills,  or  her  bottle  of  hair-wash 
for  hair-dye.  Once  released  from  its  un- 
natural labours,  her  mind  returned  instinc- 
tively to  the  trivial  as  to  its  home.  She 
glanced  at  her  hat,  perched  conspicuously  on 
the  knob  of  the  looking-glass,  and  a  dim 
sense  of  its  imperfections  came  over  her  and 
vanished  as  it  came.  Then  she  tried  to  com- 
pose herself  for  the  verdict. 


44  Superseded 

It  did  not  come  all  at  once.  First  of  all 
he  asked  her  a  great  many  questions  about 
herself  and  her  family,  whereupon  she  gave 
him  a  complete  pathological  story  of  the 
Moons  and  Quinceys.  And  all  the  time  he 
looked  so  hard  at  her  that  it  was  quite  em- 
barrassing. His  eyes  seemed  to  be  taking 
her  in  (no  other  eyes  had  ever  performed 
that  act  of  hospitality  for  Miss  Quincey). 
He  pulled  out  a  little  book  from  his  pocket 
and  made  notes  of  everything  she  said;  Miss 
Quincey's  biography  was  written  in  that 
little  book  (you  may  be  sure  nobody  else 
had  ever  thought  of  writing  it) .  And  when 
he  had  finished  the  biography  he  talked  to 
her  about  her  work  (nobody  else  had  ever 
been  the  least  interested  in  Miss  Quincey's 
work).  Then  Miss  Quincey  sat  up  in  bed 
and  became  lyrical  as  she  described  the  de- 
lirious joy  of  decimals — recurring  decimals 
— and  the  rapture  of  cube-root.  She  her- 
self had  never  got  farther  than  cube-root; 
but  it  was  enough.  Beyond  that,  she  hinted, 
lay  the  infinite.  And  Dr.  Cautley  laughed 


Bastian  Cautley,  M.  £).        4$ 

at  her  defence  of  the  noble  science.  Oh 
yes,  he  could  understand  its  fascination,  its 
irresistible  appeal  to  the  emotions;  he  only 
wished  to  remind  her  that  it  was  the  most 
debilitating  study  in  the  world.  He  refused 
to  commit  himself  to  any  opinion  as  to  the 
original  strength  and  magnitude  of  Miss 
Quincey's  brain;  he  could  only  assure  her 
that  the  most  powerful  intellect  in  the  world 
would  break  down  if  you  kept  it  perpetually 
doing  sums  in  arithmetic.  It  was  the  mo- 
notony of  the  thing,  you  see;  year  after  year 
Miss  Quincey  had  been  ploughing  up  the 
same  little  patch  of  brain.  No,  certainly 
not — she  mustn't  think  of  going  back  to  St. 
Sidwell's  for  another  three  months. 

Three  months !  Impossible !  It  was  a 
whole  term. 

Dr.  Cautley  scowled  horribly  and  said 
that  if  she  was  ever  to  be  fit  for  cube-root 
and  decimals  again,  she  positively  and  abso- 
lutely must.  Whereupon  Miss  Quincey 
gave  way  to  emotion. 

To  leave  St.  Sidwell's,  abandon  her  post 


46  Superseded 

for  three  months,  she  who  had  never  been 
absent  for  a  day!  If  she  did  that  it  would 
be  all  up  with  Miss  Quincey;  a  hundred 
eager  applicants  were  ready  to  fill  her  empty 
place.  It  was  as  if  she  heard  the  hungry, 
leaping  pack  behind  her,  the  strong  young 
animals  trained  for  the  chase;  they  came 
tearing  on  the  scent,  hunting  her,  treacling 
her  down. 

When  Rhoda  Vivian  looked  in  after  morn- 
ing school,  she  found  a  flushed  and  em- 
barrassed young  man  trying  to  soothe  Miss 
Quincey,  who  paid  not  the  least  attention  to 
him;  she  seemed  to  have  shrunk  into  her 
bed,  and  lay  there  staring  with  dilated  eyes 
like  a  hare  crouched  flat  and  trembling  in 
her  form.  From  the  other  side  of  the  bed 
Dr.  Cautley's  helpless  and  desperate  smile 
claimed  Rhoda  as  his  ally.  It  seemed  to 
say,  "For  God's  sake  take  my  part  against 
this  unreasonable  woman." 

Now  no  one  (not  even  Miss  Quincey) 
could  realize  the  insecurity  of  Miss  Quin- 
cey's  position  better  than  Rhoda,  who  was 


Bastian  Cautley,  M.  D.        47 

fathoms  deep  in  the  confidence  of  the  Head. 
She  happened  to  know  that  Miss  Cursiter 
was  only  waiting  for  an  opportunity  like  this 
to  rid  herself  for  ever  of  the  little  obstruc- 
tive. She  knew  too  that  once  they  had 
ceased  to  fill  their  particular  notch  in  it,  the 
world  had  no  further  use  for  people  like 
Miss  Quincey;  that  she,  Rhoda  Vivian,  be- 
longed to  the  new  race  whose  eternal  des- 
tiny was  to  precipitate  their  doom.  It  was 
the  first  time  that  Rhoda  had  thought  of  it 
in  that  light;  the  first  time  indeed  that  she 
had  greatly  concerned  herself  with  any 
career  beside  her  own.  She  sat  for  a  few 
minutes  talking  to  Miss  Quincey  and  think- 
ing as  she  talked.  Perhaps  she  was  wonder- 
ing how  she  would  like  to  be  forty-five  and 
incompetent;  to  be  overtaken  on  the  terrible 
middle- way;  to  feel  the  hurrying  genera- 
tions after  her,  their  breath  on  her  shoul- 
ders, their  feet  on  her  heels;  to  have  no 
hope;  to  see  Mrs.  Moon  sitting  before  her, 
immovable  and  symbolic,  the  image  of  what 
she  must  become.  They  were  two  very  ab- 


48  Superseded 

surd  and  diminutive  figures,  but  they  stood 
for  a  good  deal. 

To  Cautley,  Rhoda  herself  as  she  revolved 
these  things  looked  significant  enough. 
Leaning  forward,  one  elbow  bent  on  her 
knee,  her  chin  propped  on  her  hand,  her  lips 
pouting,  her  forehead  knit,  she  might  have 
been  a  young  and  passionate  Pallas,  brood- 
ing tempestuously  on  the  world. 

"Miss  Vivian  is  on  my  side,  I  see.  I'll 
leave  her  to  do  the  fighting." 

And  he  left  her. 

Rhoda's  first  movement  was  to  capture 
Miss  Quincey's  hand  as  it  wildly  recon- 
noitred for  a  pocket  handkerchief  among  the 
pillows. 

"Don't  worry  about  it,"  she  said,  "I'll 
speak  to  Miss  Cursiter." 

Dr.  Cautley,  enduring  a  perfunctory  five 
minutes  with  Mrs.  Moon,  could  hear  Miss 
Vivian  running  downstairs  and  the  front 
door  opening  and  closing  upon  her.  With 
a  little  haste  and  discretion  he  managed  to 
overtake  her  before  she  had  gone  very  far. 


Bastian  Cautley,  M.  D.        49 

He  stopped  to  give  his  verdict  on  her 
friend. 

She  had  expected  him. 

"Well,"  she  asked,  "it  is  overwork,  isn't 
it?" 

"Very  much  overwork;  and  no  wonder. 
I  knew  she  was  a  St.  Sidwell's  woman  as 
soon  as  I  saw  her." 

"That  was  clever  of  you.  And  do  you 
always  know  a  St.  Sidwell's  woman  when 
you  see  one  ?" 

''I  do;  they  all  go  like  this,  more  or  less. 
It  seems  to  me  that  St.  Sidwell's  sacrifices 
its  women  to  its  girls,  and  its  girls  to  itself. 
I  don't  imagine  you've  much  to  do  with  the 
place,  so  you  won't  mind  my  saying  so." 

Rhoda  smiled  a  little  maliciously. 

"You  seem  to  take  a  great  deal  for 
granted.  As  it  happens  I  am  Classical  Mis- 
tress there." 

Dr.  Cautley  looked  at  her  and  bit  his  lip. 
He  was  annoyed  with  himself  for  his  blunder 
and  with  her  for  being  anything  but  Rhoda 
Vivian — pure  and  simple. 


50  Superseded 

Rhoda  laughed  frankly  at  his  confusion. 

"Never  mind.  Appearances  are  deceit- 
ful. I'm  glad  I  don't  look  like  it." 

"You  certainly  do  not.  Still,  Miss  Quin- 
cey  is  a  warning  to  anybody." 

"She  ?     She  was  never  fit  for  the  life." 

"No.  Your  race  is  to  the  swift  and  your 
battle  to  the  strong." 

He  was  still  looking  at  her  as  he  spoke. 
She  was  looking  straight  before  her,  her 
nostrils  slightly  distended,  her  grey  eyes 
wide,  as  if  she  sniffed  the  battle,  saw  the 
goal. 

"We  must  make  her  strong,"  said  he. 

She  had  quickened  her  pace  as  if  under  a 
renewed  impulse  of  energy  and  will.  Sud- 
denly at  the  door  of  the  College  she  stopped 
and  held  out  her  hand. 

"You  will  look  after  her  well,  will  you 
not  ?"  Her  voice  was  resonant  on  the  note 
of  appeal. 

Now  you  could  withstand  Rhoda  in  her 
domineering  mood  if  you  were  strong 
enough  and  cool  enough;  but  when  she 


Bastian  Cautley,  M.  D.         51 

looked  straight  through  your  eyes  in  that 
way  she  was  irresistible.  Cautley  did  not 
attempt  to  resist  her. 

He  went  on  his  way  thinking  how  intoler- 
able the  question  might  have  been  in  some 
one  else's  mouth;  how  suggestive  of  imperti- 
nent coquetry,  the  beautiful  woman's  as- 
sumption that  he  would  do  for  her  what  he 
would  not  do  for  insignificant  Miss  Quin- 
cey.  She  had  taken  it  for  granted  that  his 
interest  in  Miss  Quincey  was  supreme. 


CHAPTER  V 
anD  IRcgenerators 


RHODA  had  spoken  to  Miss  Cursiter. 
Nobody  ever  knew  what  she  said  to 
her,  but  the  next  day  Miss  Cursiter's  secre- 
tary had  the  pleasure  to  inform  Miss  Quin- 
cey  that  she  would  have  leave  of  absence 
for  three  months,  and  that  her  place  would 
be  kept  for  her. 

Miss  Quincey  had  become  a  person  of  im- 
portance. Old  Martha  fumbled  about,  un- 
naturally attentive,  even  Mrs.  Moon  ac- 
knowledged Juliana's  right  to  be  ill  if  her 
foolish  mind  were  set  on  it.  There  was 
nothing  active  or  spontaneous  in  the  Old 
Lady's  dislike  of  her  niece,  it  was  simply 
a  habit  she  had  got. 

An  agreeable  sense  of  her  dignity  stole  in 
on  the  little  woman  of  no  account.  She 
knew  and  everybody  knew  that  hers  was  no 
52 


Healers  and  Regenerators       53 

vulgar  illness.  It  was  brain  exhaustion;  al- 
together a  noble  and  transcendental  affair; 
Miss  Quincey  was  a  victim  of  the  intellectual 
life.  In  all  the  five-and-twenty  years  she 
had  worked  there  St.  Sidwell's  had  never 
heard  so  much  about  Miss  Quincey's  brain. 
And  on  her  part  Miss  Quincey  was  surprised 
to  find  that  she  had  so  many  friends.  Day 
after  day  the  teachers  left  their  cards  and 
sympathy;  the  girls  sent  flowers  with  love; 
there  were  even  messages  of  inquiry  from 
Miss  Cursiter.  And  not  only  flowers  and 
sympathy,  but  more  solid  testimonials 
poured  in  from  St.  Sidwell's,  parcels  which 
by  some  curious  coincidence  contained 
everything  that  Dr.  Cautley  had  suggested 
and  Miss  Quincey  refused  on  the  grounds 
that  she  "couldn't  fancy  it."  For  a  long 
time  Miss  Quincey  was  supremely  happy  in 
tke  belief  that  these  delicacies  were  sent  by 
the  Head;  and  she  said  to  herself  that  one 
had  only  to  be  laid  aside  a  little  while  for 
one's  worth  to  be  appreciated.  It  was  as  if 
a  veil  of  blessed  illusion  had  been  spread  be- 


54  Superseded 

tween  her  and  her  world;  and  nobody  knew 
whose  fingers  had  been  busy  in  weaving  it  so 
close  and  fine. 

Dr.  Cautley  came  every  day  and  always 
at  the  same  time.  At  first  he  was  pretty 
sure  to  find  Miss  Vivian,  sitting  with  Miss 
Quincey  or  drinking  tea  in  perilous  intimacy 
with  Mrs.  Moon.  Then  came  a  long  spell 
when,  time  it  as  he  would,  he  never  saw 
her  at  all.  Rhoda  had  taken  it  into  her  head 
to  choose  six  o'clock  for  her  visits,  and  at 
six  he  was  bound  to  be  at  home  for  con- 
sultations. But  Rhoda  or  no  Rhoda,  he 
kept  his  promise.  He  was  looking  well 
after  Miss  Quincey.  He  would  have  done 
that  as  a  matter  of  course;  for  his  worst 
enemies — and  he  had  several — could  not  say 
that  Cautley  ever  neglected  his  poorer  pa- 
tients. Only  he  concentrated  or  dissipated 
himself  according  to  the  nature  of  the  case, 
giving  five  minutes  to  one  and  twenty  to 
another.  When  he  could  he  gave  half-hours 
to  Miss  Quincey.  He  was  absorbed,  ex- 
cited; he  battled  by  her  bedside;  his  spirits 


Healers  and  Regenerators       55 

went  up  and  down  with  every  fluctuation 
of  her  pulse;  you  would  have  thought  that 
Miss  Quincey's  case  was  one  of  exquisite 
interest,  rarity  and  charm,  and  that  Cautley 
had  staked  his  reputation  on  her  recovery. 
When  he  said  to  her  in  his  emphatic  way, 
"We  must  get  you  well,  Miss  Quincey,"  his 
manner  implied  that  it  would  be  a  very  seri- 
ous thing  for  the  universe  if  Miss  Quincey 
did  not  get  well.  When  he  looked  at  her 
his  eyes  seemed  to  be  taking  her  in,  taking 
her  in,  seeing  nothing  in  all  the  world  but 
her. 

As  it  happened,  sooner  than  anybody  ex- 
pected Miss  Quincey  did  get  well.  Mrs. 
Moon  was  the  first  to  notice  that.  She 
hailed  Juliana's  recovery  as  a  sign  of  grace, 
of  returning  allegiance  to  the  memory  of 
Tollington  Moon. 

"Now,"  said  the  Old  Lady,  "I  hope  we've 
seen  the  last  of  Dr.  Cautley." 

"Of  course  we  have,"  said  Miss  Quincey. 
She  said  it  irritably,  but  everybody  knows 
that  a  little  temper  is  the  surest  symptom  of 


56  Superseded 

returning  health.  "What  should  he  come 
for?" 

"To  run  up  his  little  bill,  my  dear.  You 
don't  imagine  he  comes  for  the  pleasure  of 
seeing  you?" 

"I  never  imagine  anything,"  said  the  little 
arithmetic  teacher  with  some  truth. 

But  they  had  by  no  means  seen  the  last 
of  him.  If  the  Old  Lady's  theory  was  cor- 
rect, Cautley  must  have  been  the  most 
grossly  avaricious  of  young  men.  The 
length  of  his  visits  was  infamous,  their  fre- 
quency appalling.  He  kept  on  coming  long 
after  Miss  Quincey  was  officially  and  ob- 
viously well;  and  on  the  most  trivial,  the 
most  ridiculous  pretexts.  It  was  "just  to 
see  how  she  was  getting  on,"  or  "because  he 
happened  to  be  passing,"  or  "to  bring  that 
book  he  told  her  about."  He  had  prescribed 
a  course  of  light  literature  for  Miss  Quin- 
cey and  seemed  to  think  it  necessary  to  sup- 
ply his  own  drugs.  To  be  sure  he  brought 
a  great  many  medicines  that  you  cannot  get 
made  up  at  the  chemist's,  insight,  under- 


Healers  and  Regenerators       57 

standing,  sympathy,  the  tonic  of  his  own 
virile  youth;  and  Heaven  only  knows  if 
these  things  were  not  the  most  expensive. 

All  the  time  Miss  Quincey  was  trying  to 
keep  up  with  the  new  standard  imposed  on 
the  staff.  Hitherto  she  had  laboured  under 
obvious  disadvantages;  now,  in  her  leisurely 
convalescence,  sated  as  she  was  with  time, 
she  wallowed  openly  and  wantonly  in  Gen- 
eral Culture.  And  it  seemed  that  the  doctor 
had  gone  in  for  General  Culture  too.  He 
could  talk  to  her  for  ever  about  Shakespeare, 
Tennyson  and  Browning.  Miss  Quincey 
was  always  dipping  into  those  poets  now, 
always  drawing  water  from  the  wells  of 
literature.  By  the  way,  she  was  head  over 
heels  in  debt  to  Sordello,  and  was  working 
double  time  to  pay  him  off.  She  reported 
her  progress  with  glee.  It  was  "only  a  hun- 
dred and  thirty-eight  more  pages,  Dr.  Caut- 
ley.  In  forty-six  days  I  shall  have  finished 
Sordello." 

"Then  you  will  have  done  what  I  never 
did  in  my  whole  life." 


58  Superseded 

It  amused  Cautley  to  talk  to  Miss  Quin- 
cey.  She  wore  such  an  air  of  adventure; 
she  was  so  fresh  and  innocent  in  her  ex- 
cursions into  the  realms  of  gold;  and  when 
she  sat  handling  her  little  bits  of  Tenny- 
son and  Browning  as  if  they  had  been  rare 
nuggets  recently  dug  up  there,  what  could 
he  do  but  feign  astonishment  and  interest? 
He  had  travelled  extensively  in  the  realms 
of  gold.  He  was  acquainted  with  all  the 
poets  and  intimate  with  most ;  he  knew  some 
of  them  so  well  as  to  be  able  to  make  jokes 
at  their  expense.  He  was  at  home  in  their 
society.  Beside  his  light-hearted  intimacy 
Miss  Cursiter's  academic  manner  showed 
like  the  punctilious  advances  of  an  outsider. 
But  he  was  terribly  modern  this  young  man. 
He  served  strange  gods,  healers  and  regen- 
erators whose  names  had  never  penetrated 
to  St.  Sidwell's.  Some  days  he  was  really 
dreadful;  he  shook  his  head  over  the  Idylls 
of  the  King,  made  no  secret  of  his  unbelief 
in  The  Princess,  and  shamelessly  declared 
that  a  great  deal  of  In  Mernoriam  would  go 


Healers  and  Regenerators       59 

where  Mendelssohn  and  the  old  crinolines 
have  gone. 

Then  something  very  much  worse  than 
that  happened;  Miss  Quincey  gave  him  a 
copy  of  the  "Address  to  the  Students  and 
Teachers  of  St.  Sidwell's,"  and  it  made  him 
laugh.  She  pointed  out  the  bit  about  the 
healers  and  regenerators,  and  refreshing 
yourself  at  the  wells  of  literature.  "That 
is  a  beautiful  passage,"  said  Miss  Quincey. 

He  laughed  more  than  ever. 

"Oh  yes,  beautiful,  beautiful.  They're  to 
do  it  in  their  evenings,  are  they?  And 
when  they're  faint  and  weary  with  their 
day's  work?"  And  he  laughed  again  quite 
loud,  laughed  till  Mrs.  Moon  woke  out  of  a 
doze  and  started  as  if  this  world  had  come 
to  an  end  and  another  one  had  begun.  He 
was  very  sorry,  and  he  begged  a  thousand 
pardons;  but,  really,  that  passage  was  un- 
speakably funny.  He  didn't  know  that 
Miss  Cursiter  had  such  a  rich  vein  of  hu- 
mour in  her.  For  the  life  of  her  Miss  Quin- 
cey could  not  see  what  there  was  to  laugh 


60  Superseded 

at,  nor  why  she  should  be  teased  about 
Tennyson  and  bantered  on  the  subject  of 
Browning;  but  she  enjoyed  it  all  the  same. 
He  was  so  young;  he  was  like  a  big  school- 
boy throwing  stones  into  the  living  wells  of 
literature  and  watching  for  the  splash;  it 
did  her  good  to  look  at  him.  So  she  looked, 
smiling  her  starved  smile  and  snatching  a 
fearful  joy  from  his  profane  conversation. 
There  were  moments  when  she  asked  her- 
self how  he  came  to  be  there  at  all;  he  was 
so  out-of-place  somehow.  The  Moons  and 
Quinceys  denounced  him  as  a  stranger  and 
intruder;  the  very  chairs  and  tables  had 
memories,  associations  that  rejected  him; 
everything  in  the  room  suggested  the  same 
mystic  antagonism;  it  was  as  if  Mrs.  Moon 
and  all  her  household  gods  were  in  league 
against  him.  Oddly  enough  this  attitude  of 
theirs  heightened  her  sense  of  intimacy  with 
him,  made  him  hers  and  no  one  else's  for 
the  time.  The  pleasure  she  took  in  his  so- 
ciety had  some  of  the  peculiar  private  ecstasy 
of  sin. 


Healers  and  Regenerators      61 

And  Mrs.  Moon  wondered  what  the  young 
man  was  going  to  charge  for  that  little 
visit;  and  what  the  total  of  his  account 
would  be.  She  said  that  if  Juliana  didn't 
give  him  a  hint,  she  would  be  obliged  to 
speak  to  him  herself;  and  at  that  Juliana 
looked  frightened  and  begged  that  Mrs. 
Moon  would  do  nothing  of  the  kind. 
"There  will  be  no  charge  for  friendly  visits," 
said  she;  and  she  made  a  rapid  calculation  in 
the  top  of  her  head.  Nineteen  visits  at,  say, 
seven-and-six  a  visit,  would  come  to  exactly 
nine  pounds  nine  and  sixpence.  And  she 
smiled ;  possibly  she  thought  it  was  worth  it. 

And  really  those  friendly  visits  had  some- 
times an  ambiguous  character;  he  dragged 
his  profession  into  them  by  the  head  and 
shoulders.  He  had  left  off  scribbling  pre- 
scriptions, but  he  would  tell  her  what  to  take 
in  a  light  and  literary  way,  as  if  it  was  just 
part  of  their  very  interesting  conversation. 
Browning  was  bitter  and  bracing,  he  was 
like  iron  and  quinine,  and  by  the  way  she 
had  better  take  a  little  of  both.  Then  when 


6  2  Superseded 

he  met  her  again  he  would  ask,  "Have  you" 
been  taking  any  more  Browning,  Miss  Quin- 
cey?"  and  while  Miss  Quincey  owned  with 
a  blush  that  she  had,  he  would  look  at  her 
and  say  she  wanted  a  change — a  little 
Tennyson  and  a  lighter  tonic;  strychnine 
and  arsenic  was  the  thing. 

And  Mrs.  Moon  still  wondered.  "I  never 
saw  anything  like  the  indelicacy  of  that 
young  man,"  said  she.  "You're  running  up 
a  pretty  long  bill,  I  can  tell  you." 

Oh,  yes,  a  long,  long  bill;  for  we  pay 
heavily  for  our  pleasures  in  this  sad  world, 
Juliana ! 


CHAPTER  VI 
Spring  jpaebions 

WINTER  had  come  and  gone,  and 
spring  found  Miss  Quincey  back 
again  at  St.  Sidwell's,  the  place  of  illumina- 
tion; a  place  that  knew  rather  less  of  her 
than  it  had  known  before.  After  five-and- 
twenty  years  of  constant  attendance  she  had 
only  to  be  away  three  months  to  be  forgot- 
ten. The  new  staff  was  not  greatly  con- 
cerned with  Miss  Quincey;  it  was  always 
busy.  As  for  the  girls,  they  were  wholly 
given  over  to  the  new  worship  of  Rhoda 
Vivian;  impossible  to  rouse  them  to  the 
faintest  interest  in  Miss  Quincey. 

Her  place  had  been  kept  for  her  by 
Rhoda.  Rhoda  had  put  out  the  strong 
young  arm  that  she  was  so  proud  of,  and 
held  back  for  a  little  while  Miss  Quincey's 
fate;  and  now  at  all  costs  she  was  deter- 
63 


64  Superseded 

mined  to  stand  between  her  and  the  truth. 
So  Miss  Quincey  never  knew  that  it  was 
Rhoda  who  was  responsible  for  the  delicate 
attentions  she  had  received  during  her  ill- 
ness; Rhoda  who  had  bought  and  sent  off 
the  presents  from  St.  Sidwell's;  Rhoda  who 
had  conceived  that  pretty  little  idea  of  flow- 
ers "with  love";  and  Rhoda  who  had  in- 
spired the  affectionate  messages  of  the  staff. 
(The  Classical  Mistress  had  to  draw  most 
extravagantly  on  her  popularity  in  order  to 
work  that  fraud.)  Rhoda  had  taken  her 
place,  and  it  was  not  in  Rhoda's  power  to 
give  it  back  to  her.  But  Miss  Quincey 
never  saw  it;  for  a  subtler  web  than  that  of 
Rhoda's  spinning  was  woven  about  her  eyes. 
Possibly  in  some  impressive  and  inap- 
parent  way  her  unhappy  little  favourite 
Laura  Lazarus  may  have  been  glad  to  see 
her  back  again,  though  the  two  queer  crea- 
tures exchanged  no  greeting  more  intimate 
than  an  embarrassed  smile.  In  this  rapidly- 
advancing  world  the  Mad  Hatter  alone  re- 
mained where  Miss  Quincey  had  left  her. 


Spring  Fashions  65 

She  explained  at  some  length  how  the  fig- 
ures twisted  themselves  round  in  her  head 
and  would  never  stay  the  same  for  a  minute 
together.  Miss  Quincey  listened  patiently 
to  this  explanation;  she  was  more  indulgent, 
less  persistent  than  before. 

Under  that  veil  of  illusion  she  herself  had 
become  communicative.  She  went  up  and 
down  between  the  classes  and  poured  out  her 
soul  as  to  an  audience  all  interest,  all  sym- 
pathy. There  was  a  certain  monotony 
about  her  conversation  since  the  epoch  of 
her  illness.  It  was,  "Oh  yes,  I  am  quite 
well  now,  thank  you.  Dr.  Cautley  is  so  very 
clever.  Dr.  Cautley  has  taken  splendid  care 
of  me.  Dr.  Cautley  has  been  so  very  kind 
and  attentive,  I  think  it  would  be  ungrateful 
of  me  if  I  had  not  got  well.  Dr.  Caut- 
ley  "  Perhaps  it  was  just  as  well  for 

Miss  Quincey  that  the  staff  were  too  busy  to 
attend  to  her.  The  most  they  noticed  was 
that  in  the  matter  of  obstruction  Miss  Quin- 
cey was  not  quite  so  precipitate  as  she  had 
been.  She  offended  less  by  violent  contact 


66  Superseded 

and  rebound  than  by  drifting  absently  into 
the  processions  and  getting  mixed  up  with 
them. 

Rhoda  saw  a  change  in  her;  Rhoda  was 
never  too  busy  to  spare  a  thought  for  Miss 
Ouincey.  "Yes,"  she  said,  "you  are  better. 
Your  eyes  are  brighter." 

"That,"  said  Miss  Ouincey,  with  simple 
pride  "is  the  arsenic.  Dr.  Cautley  is  giving 
me  arsenic." 

Now  arsenic  (like  happiness)  has  some 
curious  properties.  It  looks  most  innocently 
like  sugar,  which  it  is  not.  A  little  of  it  goes 
a  long  way  and  undoubtedly  acts  as  a  tonic; 
a  little  more  may  undermine  the  stoutest 
constitution,  and  a  little  too  much  of  it  is  ;i 
deadly  poison  and  kills  you.  As  yet  Miss 
Ouincey  had  only  taken  it  in  microscopic 
doses.  Something  had  changed  her;  it  may 
have  been  happiness,  it  may  have  been  il- 
lusion; whatever  it  was  Miss  Quincey 
thought  it  was  the  arsenic — if  it  was  not  the 
weather,  the  very  remarkable  weather.  For 
that  year  Spring  came  with  a  burst. 


Spring  Fashions  67 

Indeed  there  is  seldom  anything  shy  and 
tentative,  anything  obscure  and  gradual 
about  the  approaches  of  the  London  Spring. 
Spring  is  always  in  a  hurry  there,  for  she 
knows  that  she  has  but  a  short  time  before 
her;  she  has  to  make  an  impression  and 
make  it  at  once;  so  she  works  careless  of 
delicacies  and  shades,  relying  on  broad  tell- 
ing strokes,  on  strong  outlines  and  stinging 
contrasts.  She  is  like  a  clever  artist  handi- 
capped with  her  materials.  Only  a  patch  of 
grass,  a  few  trees  and  the  sky;  but  you  wake 
one  morning  and  the  boughs  are  drawn 
black  and  bold  against  the  blue;  and  leaves 
are  sharp  as  emeralds  against  the  black;  and 
the  grass  in  the  squares  and  the  shrubs  in  the 
gardens  repeat  the  same  brilliant  extrava- 
ganza ;  and  it  is  all  very  eccentric  and  beauti- 
ful and  daring.  That  is  the  way  of  a 
Cockney  Spring,  and  when  you  are  used  to 
it  the  charm  is  undeniable. 

One  day  Miss  Quincey  walked  in  Cam- 
den  Town  and  noted  the  singular  caprices  of 
the  Spring.  Strange  longings,  freaks  of  the 


68  Superseded 

blood  and  brain,  stirred  within  her  at  this 
bursting  of  the  leaf.  They  led  her  into 
Camden  Road,  into  the  High  Street,  to  the 
great  shops  where  the  virginal  young  fash- 
ions and  the  artificial  flowers  are.  At  this 
season  Hunter's  window  blooms  out  in 
blouses  of  every  imaginable  colour  and  tex- 
ture and  form.  There  was  one,  a  silk  one, 
of  so  discreet  and  modest  a  mauve  that  you 
could  have  called  it  lavender.  To  say  that 
it  caught  Miss  Quincey's  eye  would  be  to 
wrong  that  maidenly  garment.  There  was 
nothing  blatant,  nothing  importunate  in  its 
behaviour.  Gently,  imperceptibly,  it  stole 
into  the  field  of  vision  and  stood  there, 
delicately  alluring.  It  could  afford  to  wait. 
It  had  not  even  any  pattern  to  speak  of,  only 
an  indefinable  white  something,  a  dice,  a 
diaper,  a  sprig.  It  was  the  sprig  that 
touched  her,  tempted  her. 

Amongst  the  poorer  ranks  of  Miss  Quin- 
cey's profession  the  sumptuary  laws  are  ex- 
ceptionally severe.  It  is  a  crime,  a  treachery, 
to  spend  money  on  mere  personal  adorn- 


Spring  Fashions  69 

ment.  You  are  clothed,  not  for  beauty's 
sake,  but  because  the  rigour  of  the  climate 
and  of  custom  equally  require  it.  Miss 
Quincey's  conscience  pricked  her  all  the  time 
that  she  stood  looking  in  at  Hunter's  win- 
dow. Never  before  had  she  suffered  so 
terrible  a  solicitation  of  the  senses.  It  was 
as  if  all  those  dim  and  germinal  desires  had 
burst  and  blossomed  in  this  sinful  passion 
for  a  blouse.  She  resisted,  faltered,  re- 
sisted; turned  away  and  turned  back  again. 
The  blouse  sat  immovable  on  its  wooden 
bust,  absolute  in  its  policy  of  reticence. 
Miss  Quincey  had  just  decided  that  it  had  a 
thought  too  much  mauve  in  it,  and  was  most 
successfully  routing  desire  by  depreciation 
of  its  object  when  a  shopman  stepped  on  to 
the  stage,  treading  airily  among  the  gauzes 
and  the  flowers.  There  was  no  artifice 
about  the  young  man ;  it  was  in  the  dream- 
iest abstraction  that  he  clasped  that  fair 
form  round  the  collar  and  turned  it  to  the 
light.  It  shuddered  like  a  living  thing;  its 
violent  mauve  vanished  in  silver  grey.  The 


jo  Superseded 

effect  was  irresistible.  Miss  Quincey  was 
tempted  beyond  all  endurance;  and  she  fell. 
Once  in  possession  of  the  blouse,  its  price,  a 
guinea,  paid  over  the  counter,  Miss  Quincey 
was  all  discretion.  She  carried  her  treasure 
home  in  a  pasteboard  box  concealed  under 
her  cape;  lest  its  shameless  arrival  in  Hun- 
ter's van  should  excite  scandal  and  remark. 
That  night,  behind  a  locked  door,  Miss 
Quincey  sat  up  wrestling  and  battling  with 
her  blouse.  To  Miss  Quincey  in  the  watches 
of  the  night  it  seemed  that  a  spirit  of  obsti- 
nate malevolence  lurked  in  that  deceitful  gar- 
ment. Like  all  the  things  in  Hunter's  shop, 
it  was  designed  for  conventional  well- 
rounded  womanhood.  It  repudiated  the 
very  idea  of  Miss  Quincey;  in  every  fold  it 
expressed  its  contempt  for  her  person;  its 
collar  was  stiff  with  an  invincible  repug- 
nance. Miss  Quincey  had  to  take  it  in 
where  it  went  out,  and  let  it  out  where  it 
went  in,  to  pinch,  pull,  humour  and  propiti- 
ate it  before  it  would  consent  to  cling  to  her 
diminished  figure.  When  all  was  done  she 


Spring  Fashions  71 

wrapped  it  in  tissue  paper  and  hid  it  away 
in  a  drawer  out  of  sight,  for  the  very 
thought  of  it  frightened  her.  But  when  next 
she  went  to  look  at  it  she  hardly  knew  it 
again.  The  malignity  seemed  all  smoothed 
out  of  it;  it  lay  there  with  its  meek  sleeves 
folded,  the  very  picture  of  injured  innocence 
and  reproach.  Miss  Quincey  thought  she 
might  get  reconciled  to  it  in  time.  A  day 
might  even  come  when  she  would  be  brave 
enough  to  wear  it. 

Not  many  days  after,  Miss  Quincey  might 
have  been  seen  coming  out  of  St.  Sidwell's 
with  a  reserved  and  secret  smile  playing 
about  her  face;  so  secret  and  so  reserved, 
that  nobody,  not  even  Miss  Quincey,  could 
tell  what  it  was  playing  at. 

Miss  Quincey  was  meditating  an  audacity. 

That  night  she  took  pen  and  paper  up  to 
her  bedroom  and  sat  down  to  write  a  little 
note.  Sat  down  to  write  it  and  got  up 
again ;  wrote  it  and  tore  it  up,  and  sat  down 
to  write  another.  This  she  left  open  for 
such  emendations  and  improvements  as 


72  Superseded 

should  occur  to  her  in  the  night.  Perhaps 
none  did  occur;  perhaps  she  realized  that  a 
literary  work  loses  its  force  and  spontaneity 
in  conscious  elaboration ;  anyhow  the  note 
was  put  up  just  as  it  was  and  posted  first 
thing  in  the  morning  at  the  pillar-box  on  her 
way  to  St.  Sidwell's. 

Old  Martha  was  cleaning  the  steps  as 
Miss  Quincey  went  out;  but  Miss  Quincey 
carefully  avoided  looking  Martha's  way. 
Like  the  ostrich  she  supposed  that  if  she  did 
not  see  Martha,  Martha  could  not  see  her. 
But  Martha  had  seen  her.  She  saw  every- 
thing. She  had  seen  the  note  open  on  Miss 
Juliana's  table  by  the  window  in  the  bed- 
room when  she  was  drawing  up  the  blind; 
she  had  seen  the  silk  blouse  lying  in  its  tissue 
paper  when  she  was  tidying  Miss  Juliana's 
drawer;  and  that  very  afternoon  she  dis- 
covered a  certain  cake  deposited  by  Miss 
Juliana  in  the  dining-room  cupboard  with 
every  circumstance  of  secrecy  and  disguise. 

And  Martha  shook  her  old  head  and  put 
that  and  that  together,  the  blouse,  the  cake 


Spring  Fashions  73 

and  the  letter;  though  what  connection  there 
could  possibly  be  between  the  three  was 
more  than  Miss  Juliana  could  have  told  her. 
Even  to  Martha  the  association  was  so  sin- 
gular that  it  pointed  to  some  painful  aberra- 
tion of  intellect  on  Miss  Juliana's  part. 

As  in  duty  bound,  Martha  brought  up  her 
latest   discovery   and   laid   it   before   Mrs. 
Moon.     Beyond  that  she  said  nothing,  in- 
deed there  was  nothing  to  be  said.     The 
cake   (it  was  of  the  expensive  pound  va- 
riety, crowned  with  a  sugar  turret  and  sur- 
rounded with  almond  fortifications)   spoke 
for  itself,  though  in  an  unknown  language. 
"What  does  that  mean,  Martha  ?" 
"Miss  Juliana,  m'm,  I  suppose." 
Martha  pursed  up  her  lips,  suppressing 
the  impertinence  of  her  own  private  opinion 
and  awaiting  her  mistress's  with  respect. 

No  doubt  she  would  have  heard  it  but  that 
Miss  Juliana  happened  to  come  in  at  that 
moment,  and  Mrs.  Moon's  attention  was  dis- 
tracted by  the  really  amazing  spectacle  pre- 
sented by  her  niece.  And  Miss  Juliana, 


74  Superseded 

who  for  five-and-twenty  years  had  never  ap- 
peared in  anything  but  frowsy  drab  or  dingy 
grey,  Miss  Juliana  flaunting  in  silk  at  four 
o'clock  in  the  afternoon,  Miss  Juliana,  all 
shining  and  shimmering  like  a  silver  and 
mauve  chameleon,  was  a  sight  to  take  any- 
body's breath  away.  Martha  dearly  loved  a 
scene,  for  to  be  admitted  to  a  scene  was  to  be 
admitted  to  her  mistress's  confidence;  but 
the  excellent  woman  knew  her  place,  and  be- 
fore that  flagrant  apparition  she  withdrew 
as  she  would  have  withdrawn  from  a  family 
scandal. 

Miss  Ouincey  advanced  timidly,  for  of 
course  she  knew  that  she  had  to  cross  that 
room  under  fire  of  criticism;  but  on  the 
whole  she  was  less  abject  than  she  might 
have  been,  for  at  the  moment  she  was  think- 
ing of  Dr.  Cautley.  He  had  actually  ac- 
cepted her  kind  invitation,  and  that  fact 
explained  and  justified  her;  besides,  she  car- 
ried her  Browning  in  her  hand,  and  it  made 
her  feel  decidedly  more  natural. 

Mrs.  Moon  restrained  her  feelings  until 


Spring  Fashions  75 

her  niece  had  moved  about  a  bit,  and  sat 
down  by  her  enemy  the  cabinet,  and  pre- 
sented herself  in  every  possible  aspect.  The 
Old  Lady's  eyes  lost  no  movement  of  the 
curious  figure;  when  she  had  taken  it  in, 
grasped  it  in  all  its  details,  she  began. 

"Well,  I  declare,  Juliana" — (five-and- 
twenty  years  ago  she  used  to  call  her 
"Jooley,"  keeping  the  full  name  to  mark  dis- 
approval or  displeasure.  Now  it  was  always 
Juliana,  so  that  Mrs.  Moon  seemed  to  be 
permanently  displeased) — "whatever  pos- 
sessed you  to  make  such  an  exhibition  of 
yourself?  (And  will  you  draw  your  chair 
back — you're  incommoding  the  cabinet.)  I 
never  saw  anything  so  unsuitable  and  un- 
becoming in  my  life — at  this  hour  of  the  day 
too.  Why,  you're  just  like  a  whirligig  out 
of  a  pantomime.  If  you  think  you  can  carry 
off  that  kind  of  thing  you're  very  much  mis- 
taken." 

That  did  seem  to  be  Miss  Ouincey's  idea 
— to  carry  it  off;  to  brazen  it  out;  to  sit 
down  and  read  Browning  as  if  there  was 


76  Superseded 

nothing  at  all  remarkable  in  her  personal 
appearance. 

"And  to  choose  lilac  of  all  things  in  the 
world!  You  never  could  stand  that  shade 
at  the  best  of  times.  Lilac!  Why,  I  de- 
clare if  it  isn't  mauve-pink." 

"Mauve-pink!"  She  had  given  voice  to 
the  fear  that  lay  hidden  in  Miss  Quincey's 
heart.  A  sensitive  culprit  caught  in  humil- 
iating guilt  could  not  look  more  cowed  with 
self-consciousness  than  Miss  Quincey  at  that 
word.  Criminal  and  crime,  Miss  Quincey 
and  her  blouse,  seemed  linked  in  an  awful 
bond  of  mutual  abhorrence.  The  blouse 
shivered  as  Miss  Quincey  trembled  in  nerv- 
ous agitation;  as  she  went  red  and  yellow 
by  turns  it  paled  and  flushed  its  painful  pink. 
They  were  blushing  for  each  other.  For  it 
was  mauve-pink;  she  could  see  that  well 
enough  now. 

"Turn  round !" 

Miss  Quincey  turned  round. 

"Much  too  young  for  you!  Why,  bless 
me,  if  it  doesn't  throw  up  every  bit  of  yellow 


Spring  Fashions  77 

in  your  face !  If  you  don't  believe  me,  look 
in  the  glass." 

Miss  Quincey  looked  in  the  glass. 

It  did  throw  up  the  yellow  tints.  It  threw 
everything  up  to  her.  If  she  had  owned  to 
a  little  fear  of  it  before,  it  affected  her  now 
with  positive  terror.  The  thing  was  young, 
much  too  young;  and  it  was  brutal  and  vio- 
lent in  its  youth.  It  was  possessed  by  a  per- 
fect demon  of  juvenility;  it  clashed  and 
fought  with  every  object  in  the  room;  it 
made  them  all  look  old,  ever  so  old,  and 
shabby.  And  as  Miss  Quincey  stood  with  it 
before  the  looking  glass,  it  flared  up  and  told 
her  to  her  face  that  she  was  forty-five — 
forty-five,  and  looked  fifty. 

"Louisa,"  murmured  the  Old  Lady,  "was 
the  only  one  of  our  family  who  could  stand 
pink." 

"I  will  give  it  to  Louisa,"  cried  Miss 
Quincey  with  a  touch  of  passion. 

"Tehee— tehee !"  At  that  idea  the  Old 
Lady  chuckled  in  supreme  derision.  "Ca- 
pers and  nonsense !  Louisa  indeed !  Much 


78  Superseded 

good  it'll  do  Louisa  when  you've  been  and 
nipped  all  the  shape  out  of  it  to  suit  yourself. 
However  you  came  to  be  so  skimpy  and  flat- 
chested  is  a  mystery  to  me.  All  the  Quin- 
ceys  were  tall,  your  uncle  Tollington  was 
tall,  your  father,  he  was  tall ;  and  your  sister, 
well;  I  will  say  this  for  Louisa,  she's  as  tall 
as  any  of  'em,  and  she  has  a  bust." 

"Yes,  I  daresay  it  would  have  been  very 
becoming  to  Louisa,"  said  Miss  Quincey 
humbly.  "I — I  thought  it  was  lavender." 

"Lavender  or  no  lavender,  I'm  surprised 
at  you — throwing  money  away  on  a  thing 
like  that." 

"I  can  afford  it,"  said  Miss  Quincey  with 
the  pathetic  dignity  of  the  turning  worm. 

Now  it  was  not  worm-like  subtlety  that 
suggested  that  reply.  It  was  positive  in- 
spiration. By  those  simple  words  Juliana 
had  done  something  to  remove  the  slur  she 
was  always  casting  on  a  certain  character. 
Tollington  Moon  had  not  managed  his 
nieces' affairs  so  badly  after  all  if  one  of  them 
could  afford  herself  extravagances  of  that 


Spring  Fashions  79 

sort.  The  blouse  therefore  might  be  taken 
as  a  sign  and  symbol  of  his  innermost  in- 
tegrity. So  Mrs.  Moon  was  content  with 
but  one  more  parting  shot. 

"I  don't  say  you  can't  afford  the  money,  I 
say  you  can't  afford  the  colour — not  at  your 
time  of  life." 

Two  tears  that  had  gathered  in  Miss 
Quincey's  eyes  now  fell  on  the  silk,  deepen- 
ing the  mauve-pink  to  a  hideous  magenta. 

"I  was  deceived  in  the  colour,"  she  said  as 
she  turned  from  her  tormentor. 

She  toiled  upstairs  to  the  back  bedroom 
and  took  it  off.  She  could  never  wear  it. 
It  was  waste — sheer  waste;  for  no  other 
woman  could  wear  it  either;  certainly  not 
Louisa;  she  had  made  it  useless  for  Louisa 
by  paring  it  down  to  her  own  ridiculous  di- 
mensions. Louisa  was  and  always  had  been 
a  head  and  shoulders  taller  than  she  was; 
and  she  had  a  bust. 

So  Miss  Quincey  came  down  meek  and 
meagre  in  the  old  dress  that  she  served  her 
for  so  many  seasons,  and  she  looked  for 


80  Superseded 

peace.  But  that  terrible  old  lady  had  not 
done  with  her  yet,  and  the  worst  was  still  to 
come. 

No  longer  having  any  grievance  against 
the  blouse,  Mrs.  Moon  was  concentrating 
her  attention  on  that  more  mysterious  wit- 
ness to  Juliana's  foolishness — the  Cake. 

"And  now,"  said  she,  pointing  as  she 
might  have  pointed  to  a  monument,  "will 
you  kindly  tell  me  the  meaning  of  this  ?" 

"I  expect — perhaps — it  is  very  likely — 
that  Dr.  Cautley  will  come  in  to  tea  this 
afternoon." 

The  Old  Lady  peered  at  Miss  Quincey 
and  her  eyes  were  sharp  as  needles,  needles 
that  carried  the  thread  of  her  thought  pretty 
plainly  too,  but  it  was  too  fine  a  thread  for 
Miss  Quincey  to  see.  Besides  she  was  look- 
ing at  the  cake  and  almost  regretting  that 
she  had  bought  it,  lest  he  should  think  that 
it  was  eating  too  many  of  such  things  that- 
had  made  her  ill. 

"And  what  put  that  notion  into  your  head, 
I  should  like  to  know  ?" 


Spring  Fashions  81 

"He  has  written  to  say  so." 

"Juliana — you  don't  mean  to  tell  me  that 
he  invited  himself?" 

"Well,  no.  That  is — it  was  an  answer  to 
my  invitation." 

"Your  invitation  ?  You  were  not  content 
to  have  that  man  poking  his  nose  in  here  at 
all  hours  of  the  day  and  night,  but  you  must 
go  out  of  your  way  to  send  him  invita- 
tions?" 

"Dr.  Cautley  has  been  most  kind  and  at- 
tentive, and — I  thought — it  was  time  we 
paid  him  some  little  attention." 

"Attention  indeed!  I  should  be  very 
sorry  to  let  any  young  man  suppose  that  I 
paid  any  attention  to  him.  I  should  have 
thought  you'd  have  had  a  little  more 
maidenly  reserve.  Besides,  you  know  per- 
fectly well  that  I  don't  enjoy  my  tea  unless 
we  have  it  by  ourselves." 

Oh  yes,  she  knew;  they  had  been  having 
it  that  way  for  five-and-twenty  years. 

"As  for  that  cake,"  continued  the  Old 
Lady,  "it's  ridiculous.  Look  at  it.  Why, 


82  Superseded 

you  might  just  as  well  have  ordered 
wedding  cake  at  once.  I  tell  you 
what  it  is,  Juliana,  you're  getting  quite 
nighty." 

Flighty?  No  mind  but  a  feminine  one, 
grown  up  and  trained  under  the  shadow  of 
St.  Sidwell's,  could  conceive  the  nature  of 
Miss  Quincey's  feelings  on  being  told  that 
she  was  flighty.  She  herself  made  no  at- 
tempt to  express  them.  She  sat  down  and 
gasped,  clutching  her  Browning  to  give  her- 
self a  sense  of  moral  support.  All  the  rest 
was  intelligible,  she  had  understood  and  ac- 
cepted it;  but  to  be  told  that  she,  a  teacher 
in  St.  Sidwell's,  was  flighty — the  charge 
was  simply  confusing  to  the  intellect,  and  it 
left  her  dumb. 

Flighty?  When  Martha  came  in  with 
the  tea-tray  and  she  had  to  order  a  knife  for 
the  cake  and  an  extra  cup  for  Dr.  Cautley, 
she  saw  Mrs.  Moon  looking  at  Martha,  and 
Martha  looking  at  Mrs.  Moon,  and  they 
seemed  to  be  saying  to  each  other,  "How 
flighty  Miss  Juliana  is  getting." 


Spring  Fashions  83 

Flighty  ?  The  idea  afflicted  her  to  such  a 
degree  that  when  Dr.  Cautley  came  she  had 
not  a  word  to  say  to  him. 

For  a  whole  week  she  had  looked  for- 
ward to  this  tea-drinking  with  tremors  of 
joyous  expectancy  and  palpitations  of  alarm. 
It  was  to  have  been  one  of  those  rare  and 
solitary  occasions  that  can  only  come  once  in 
a  blue  moon.  The  lump  sum  of  pleasure 
that  other  people  get  spread  for  them  more 
or  less  thickly  over  the  surface  of  the  years, 
she  meant  to  take  once  for  all,  packed  and 
pressed  into  one  rapturous  hour,  one  Satur- 
day afternoon  from  four-thirty  to  five-thirty, 
the  memory  of  it  to  be  stored  up  and  econo- 
mised so  as  to  last  her  life-time,  thus  justi- 
fying the  original  expense.  She  knew  that 
success  was  doubtful,  because  of  the  uncer- 
tainty of  things  in  general  and  of  the  Old 
Lady's  temper  in  particular.  And  then  she 
had  to  stake  everything  on  his  coming;  and 
the  chances,  allowing  for  the  inevitable 
claims  on  a  doctor's  time,  were  a  thousand  to 
one  against  it.  She  had  nothing  to  go  upon 


84  Superseded 

but  the  delicate  incalculable  balance  of 
events.  And  now,  when  the  blue  moon  had 
risen,  the  impossible  thing  happened,  and  the 
man  had  come,  he  might  just  as  well,  in  fact 
a  great  deal  better,  have  stayed  away.  The 
whole  thing  was  a  waste  and  failure  from 
beginning  to  end.  The  tea  was  a  waste  and 
a  failure,  for  Martha  would  bring  it  in  a 
quarter  of  an  hour  too  soon ;  the  cake  was  a 
waste  and  a  failure,  for  nobody  ate  any  of 
it;  and  she  was  a  waste  and  a  failure — she 
hardly  knew  why.  She  cut  her  cake  with 
trembling  fingers  and  offered  it,  blushing  as 
the  gash  in  its  side  revealed  the  thoroughly 
unwholesome  nature  of  its  interior.  She 
felt  ashamed  of  its  sugary  artifice,  its 
treacherously  festive  air,  and  its  embarrass- 
ing affinity  to  bride's-cake.  No  wonder 
that  he  had  no  appetite  for  cake,  and  that 
Miss  Quincey  had  no  appetite  for  conversa- 
tion. He  tried  to  tempt  her  with  bits  of 
Browning,  but  she  refused  them  all.  She 
had  lost  her  interest  in  Browning. 

He  thought,  "She  is  too  tired  to  talk," 


Spring  Fashions  85 

and  left  half  an  hour  sooner  than  he  had  in- 
tended. 

She  thought,  "He  is  offended.  Or  else — 
he  thinks  me  flighty." 

And  that  was  all. 


CHAPTER  VII 
TUnDer  a  JSluc  fllboon 

IT  was  early  on  another  Saturday  even- 
ing, a  fortnight  after  that  disastrous 
one,  and  Miss  Quincey  was  taking  the  air  in 
Primrose  Hill  Park.  She  was  walking  to 
keep  herself  warm,  for  the  breeze  was 
brisk  and  cool.  There  was  a  little  stir  and 
flutter  in  the  trees  and  a  little  stir  and  flut- 
ter in  her  heart,  for  she  had  caught  sight  of 
Dr.  Cautley  in  the  distance.  He  was  com- 
ing round  the  comer  of  one  of  the  intersect- 
ing walks,  coming  at  a  frantic  pace,  with  the 
tails  of  his  frock-coat  waving  in  the  wind. 

He  pulled  himself  up  as  he  neared  her  and 
held  out  a  friendly  hand. 

"That's  right,  Miss  Quincey.  I'm  de- 
lighted to  see  you  out.  You  really  are  get- 
ting strong  again,  aren't  you?" 

"Yes,  thank  you — very  well,  very  strong..'* 

86 


Under  a  Blue  Moon  87 

Was  it  her  fancy,  or  did  his  manner  imply 
that  he  wanted  to  sink  that  humiliating 
episode  of  the  tea-party  and  begin  again 
where  they  had  left  off  ?  It  might  be  so;  his 
courtesy  was  so  infinitely  subtle.  He  had 
actually  turned  and  was  walking  her  way 
now. 

"And  how  is  Sordello?"  he  asked,  the 
tone  of  his  inquiry  suggesting  that  there  was 
something  seriously  the  matter  with  Sor- 
dello. 

"Getting  on.     Only  fifty-six  pages  more." 

"You  are  advancing,  MissQuincey — gain- 
ing on  him  by  leaps  and  bounds.  You're 
not  overdoing  it,  I  hope  ?" 

"Oh  no,  I  read  a  little  in  the  evenings — I 
have  to  keep  up  to  the  standard  of  the  staff. 
Indeed,"  she  added,  turning  with  a  sudden 
suicidal  panic,  "I  ought  to  be  at  home  and 
working  now." 

"What?  On  a  half-holiday?  It  is  a 
half-holiday?" 

"For  some  people — not  for  me." 

His  eyes — she  could  not  be  mistaken — 


88  Superseded 

were  taking  her  in  as  they  had  done  be- 
fore. 

"And  why  not  for  you?  Do  you  know, 
you're  looking  horribly  tired.  Suppose  we 
sit  down  a  bit." 

Miss  Quincey  admitted  that  it  would  be 
very  nice. 

"Hadn't  you  better  put  your  cape  on — the 
wind's  changing." 

She  obeyed  him. 

"That's  hardly  a  thick  enough  wrap  for 
this  weather,  is  it?" 

She  assured  him  it  was  very  warm,  very 
comfortable. 

"Do  you  know  what  I  would  like  to  do 
with  you,  Miss  Quincey?" 

"No." 

"I  should  like  to  pack  you  off  somewhere 
— anywhere — for  another  three  months' 
holiday." 

"Another  three  months!  What  would 
my  pupils  do,  and  what  would  Miss  Cursiter 
say?" 

It  was  part  of  the  illusion  that  she  con- 


ceived  herself  to  be  indispensable  to  Miss 
Cursiter. 

"Confound  Miss  Cursiter!" 

Evidently  he  felt  strongly  on  the  subject 
of  Miss  Cursiter.  He  confounded  her  with 
such  energy  that  the  seat  provided  for  them 
by  the  London  County  Council  vibrated 
under  it.  He  stared  sulkily  out  over  the 
park  a  moment;  he  gave  his  cuffs  a  hitch  as 
if  he  were  going  to  fight  somebody,  and  then 
— he  let  himself  go. 

At  a  blind  headlong  pace,  lashing  himself 
up  as  he  went,  falling  furiously  on  civiliza- 
tion, the  social  order,  women's  education  and 
women's  labour,  the  system  that  threw  open 
all  doors  to  them,  and  let  them  be  squeezed 
and  trampled  down  together  in  the  crush. 
He  was  ready  to  take  the  nineteenth  century 
by  the  throat  and  strangle  it;  he  squared 
himself  against  the  universe. 

"What,"  said  Miss  Quincey,  "do  you  not 
believe  in  equal  chances  for  men  and 
women?"  She  was  eager  to  redeem  her- 
self from  the  charge  of  flightiness. 


go  Superseded 

"Equal  chances?  I  daresay.  But  not 
unequal  work.  The  work  must  be  unequal 
if  the  conditions  are  unequal.  It's  not  the 
same  machine.  To  turn  a  woman  on  to  a 
man's  work  is  like  trying  to  run  an  express 
train  by  clock-work,  with  a  pendulum  for  a 
piston,  and  a  hairspring  for  steam." 

Miss  Quincey  timidly  hinted  that  the 
question  was  a  large  one,  that  there  was  an- 
other side  to  it. 

"Of  course  there  is;  there  are  fifty  sides 
to  it;  but  there  are  too  many  people  looking 
at  the  other  forty-nine  for  my  taste.  I 
loathe  a  crowd." 

Stirred  by  a  faint  esprit  de  corps  Miss 
Quincey  asked  him  if  he  did  not  believe  in 
the  open  door  for  women  ? 

He  said,  "It  would  be  kinder  to  shut  it  in 
their  faces." 

She  threw  in  a  word  about  the  women's 
labour  market — the  enormous  demand. 

He  said  that  only  meant  that  women's 
labour  could  be  bought  cheap  and  sold  dear. 

She  sighed. 


Under  a  Blue  Moon  91 

''But  women  must  do  something — surely 
you  see  the  necessity  ?" 

He  groaned. 

"Oh  yes.  It's  just  the  necessity  that  I  do 
see — the  damnable  necessity.  I  only  protest 
against  the  preventable  evil.  If  you  must 
turn  women  into  so  many  machines,  for 
Heaven's  sake  treat  them  like  machines. 
You  don't  work  an  engine  when  it's  under- 
going structural  alterations — because,  you 
know,  you  can't.  Your  precious  system 
recognises  no  differences.  It  sets  up  the 
same  absurd  standard  for  every  woman,  the 
brilliant  genius  and  the  average  imbecile. 
\Yhich  is  not  only  morally  odious  but  physi- 
ologically fatuous.  There  must  be  one  of 
two  results — either  the  average  imbeciles  are 
sacrificed  by  thousands  to  a  dozen  or  so  of 
brilliant  geniuses,  or  it's  the  other  way 
about." 

"Whichever  way  it  is,"  said  Miss  Quin- 
cey,  with  her  back,  so  to  speak,  to  the  wall, 
"it's  all  part  of  civilization,  of  our  intel- 
lectual progress." 


92  Superseded 

"They're  not  the  same  thing.  And  it  isn't 
civilization,  it's  intellectual  savagery.  It 
isn't  progress  either,  it's  a  blind  rush,  an 
inhuman  scrimmage — the  very  worst  form 
of  the  struggle  for  existence.  It  doesn't 
even  mean  survival  of  the  intellectually 
fittest.  It  develops  monstrosities.  It  de- 
feats its  own  ends  by  brutalising  the  intellect 
itself.  And  the  worst  enemies  of  women 
are  women.  I  swear,  if  I  were  a  woman,  I'd 
rather  do  without  an  education  than  get  it 
at  that  price.  Or  I'd  educate  myself.  After 
all,  that's  the  way  of  the  fittest — the  one  in 
a  thousand." 

"Do  you  not  approve  of  educated  women 
then  ?"  Miss  Quincey  was  quite  shaken  by 
this  cataclysmal  outbreak,  this  overturning 
and  shattering  of  the  old  beacons  and  land- 
marks. 

He  stared  into  the  distance. 

"Oh  yes,  I  approve  of  them  when  they  are 
really  educated — not  when  they  are  like  that. 
You  won't  get  the  flower  of  womanhood  out 
of  a  forcing-house  like  St.  Sidwell's;  though. 


Under  a  Blue  Moon          93 

I  daresay  it  produces  pumpkins  to  perfec- 
tion." 

What  did  he  say  to  Miss  Vivian  then? 
Miss  Quincey  could  not  think  badly  of  a  sys- 
tem that  could  produce  women  like  Miss 
Vivian. 

A  cloud  came  over  his  angry  eyes  as  they 
stared  into  the  distance. 

"That's  it.  It  hasn't  produced  them. 
They  have  produced  it." 

Miss  Quincey  smiled.  Evidently  consist- 
ency was  not  to  be  expected  of  this  young 
man.  He  was  so  young,  and  so  irrespon- 
sible and  passionate.  She  admired  him  for 
it;  and  not  only  for  that;  she  admired  him — 
she  could  not  say  exactly  why,  but  she 
thought  it  was  because  he  had  such  a  beauti- 
ful, bumpy,  intellectual  forehead.  And  as 
she  sat  beside  him  and  shook  to  that  vibrat- 
ing passion  of  his,  she  felt  as  if  the  blue 
moon  had  risen  again  and  was  shining- 
through  the  trees  of  the  park;  and  she  was 
happy,  absolutely,  indubitably  happy  and 
safe;  for  she  felt  that  he  was  her  friend  and 


94  Superseded 

her  protector  and  the  defender  of  her  cause. 
It  was  for  her  that  he  raged  and  maddened 
and  behaved  himself  altogether  so  unrea- 
sonably. 

Now  as  it  happened,  Cautley  did  cham- 
pion certain  theories  which  Miss  Cursiter, 
when  she  met  them,  denounced  as  physiol- 
ogist's fads.  But  it  was  not  they,  nor  yet 
Miss  Quincey,  that  accounted  for  his  display 
of  feeling.  He  was  angry  because  he 
wanted  to  come  to  a  certain  understanding 
with  the  Classical  Mistress;  to  come  to  it  at 
once;  and  the  system  kept  him  waiting.  It 
was  robbing  him  of  Rhoda,  and  Rhocla  of 
her  youth.  Meanwhile  Rhoda  was  superbly 
happy  at  St.  Sidwell's,  playing  at  being  Pal- 
las Athene;  as  for  checking  her  midway  in 
her  brilliant  career,  that  was  not  to  be 
thought  of  for  an  instant. 

The  flower  of  womanhood — it  was  the 
flower  of  life.  He  had  never  seen  a  woman 
so  invincibly  and  superlatively  alive.  Caut- 
ley deified  life;  and  in  his  creed,  which  was 
simplicity  itself,  life  and  health  were  one; 


Under  a  Blue  Moon  95 

health  the  sole  source  of  strength,  intelli- 
gence and  beauty,  of  all  divine  and  perfect 
possibilities.  At  least  that  was  how  he  be- 
gan. But  three  years'  practice  in  London 
had  somewhat  strained  the  faith  of  the 
young  devotee.  He  soon  found  himself  in 
the  painful  position  of  a  priest  who  no 
longer  believes  in  his  deity;  overheard  him- 
self asking  whether  health  was  not  an  unat- 
tainable ideal ;  then  declaring  that  life  itself 
was  all  a  matter  of  compromise;  finally  com- 
ing to  the  conclusion  that  the  soul  of  things 
was  Neurosis. 

Beyond  that  he  refused  to  commit  himself 
to  any  theory  of  the  universe.  He  even 
made  himself  unpleasant.  A  clerical  patient 
would  approach  him  with  conciliatory 
breadth,  and  say:  "I  envy  you,  Cautley;  I 
envy  your  marvellous  experience.  Your 
opportunities  are  greater  than  mine.  And 
sometimes,  do  you  know,  I  think  you  see 
deeper  into  the  work  of  the  Maker."  And 
Cautley  would  shrug  his  shoulders  and  smile 
in  the  good  man's  face,  and  say,  "The 


96  Superseded 

Maker!  I  can  only  tell  you  I'm  tired  of 
mending  the  work  of  the  Maker."  Yet  the 
more  he  doubted  the  harder  he  worked; 
though  his  world  spun  round  and  round, 
shrieking  like  a  clock  running  down,  and  he 
had  persuaded  himself  that  all  he  could  do 
was  to  wind  up  the  crazy  wheels  for  another 
year  or  so.  Which  all  meant  that  Cautley 
was  working  a  little  too  hard  and  running 
down  himself.  He  had  begun  to  specialize 
in  gynaecology  and  it  increased  his  scepti- 
cism. 

Then  suddenly,  one  evening,  when  he 
least  looked  for  it,  least  wanted  it,  he  saw  his 
divinity  incarnate.  Rhoda  had  appealed  to 
him  as  the  supreme  expression  of  Nature's 
will  to  live.  That  was  the  instantaneous 
and  visible  effect  of  her.  Rhoda  was  the 
red  flower  on  the  tree  of  life. 

At  St.  Sidwell's,  that  great  forcing-house, 
they  might  grow  some  vegetables  to  perfec- 
tion; whether  it  was  orchids  or  pumpkins  he 
neither  knew  nor  cared;  but  he  defied  them 
to  produce  anything  like  that.  He  was 


Under  a  Blue  Moon  97 

sorry  for  the  vegetables,  the  orchids  and  the 
pumpkins;  and  he  was  sorry  for  Miss  Quin- 
cey,  who  was  neither  a  pumpkin  nor  an  or- 
chid, but  only  a  harmless  little  withered  leaf. 
Not  a  pleasant  leaf,  the  sort  that  goes  danc- 
ing along,  all  crisp  and  curly,  in  the  arms  of 
the  rollicking  wind;  but  the  sort  that  the 
same  wind  kicks  into  a  corner,  to  lie  there 
till  it  rots  and  comes  in  handy  as  leaf  mould 
for  the  forcing-house.  Rhoda's  friend  was 
not  like  Rhoda;  yet  because  the  leaf  may 
distantly  suggest  the  rose,  he  liked  to  sit 
and  talk  to  her  and  think  about  the  most 
beautiful  woman  in  the  world.  To  any 
other  man  conversation  with  Miss  Quincey 
would  have  been  impossible;  for  Miss  Quin- 
cey in  normal  health  was  uninteresting  when 
she  was  not  absurd.  But  to  Cautley  at  all 
times  she  was  simply  heart-rending. 

For  this  young  man  with  the  irritable 
nerves  and  blasphemous  temper  had  after  all 
a  divine  patience  at  the  service  of  women, 
even  the  foolish  and  hysterical;  because  like 
their  Maker  he  knew  whereof  they  were 


98  Superseded 

made.  This  very  minute  the  queer  meta- 
physical thought  had  come  to  him  that  some- 
how, in  the  infinite  entanglement  of  things, 
such  women  as  Miss  Quincey  were  perpetu- 
ally being  sacrificed  to  such  women  as 
Rhoda  Vivian.  It  struck  him  that  Nature 
had  made  up  for  any  little  extra  outlay  in 
one  direction  by  cruel  pinching  in  another. 
It  was  part  of  her  rigid  economy.  She  was 
not  going  to  have  any  bills  running  up 
against  her  at  the  other  end  of  the  universe. 
Nature  had  indulged  in  Rhoda  Vivian  and 
she  was  making  Miss  Quincey  pay. 

He  wondered  if  that  notion  had  struck 
Rhoda  Vivian  too,  and  if  she  were  trying 
to  make  up  for  it.  He  had  noticed  that 
Miss  Quincey  had  the  power  (if  you  could 
predicate  power  of  such  a  person),  a  power 
denied  to  him,  of  drawing  out  the  woman- 
hood of  the  most  beautiful  woman  in  the 
world;  some  infinite  tenderness  in  Rhoda 
answered  to  the  infinite  absurdity  in  her. 
He  was  not  sure  that  her  attitude  to  Miss 
Quincey  was  not  the  most  beautiful  thing 


Under  a  Blue  Moon  99 

about  her.  He  had  begun  by  thinking  about 
the  colour  of  Rhoda's  eyes.  He  could  not 
for  the  life  of  him  remember  whether  they 
were  blue  or  green,  till  something  (Miss 
Quincey's  eyes  perhaps)  reminded  him  that 
they  were  grey,  pure  grey,  without  a  taint 
of  green  or  a  shadow  of  blue  in  them.  That 
was  what  his  mind  was  running  on  as  he 
looked  into  the  distance  and  Miss  Quincey 
imagined  that  his  bumpy  intellectual  fore- 
head was  bulging  with  great  thoughts.  And 
now  Miss  Quincey  supplied  a  convenient 
pivot  for  the  wild  gyrations  of  his  wrath. 
He  got  up  and  with  his  hands  behind  his 
back  he  seemed  to  be  lashing  himself  into  a 
fury  with  his  coat-tail. 

"The  whole  thing  is  one-sided  and  arti- 
ficial and  absurd.  Bad  enough  for  men,  but 
fatal  for  women.  Any  system  that  unfits 
them  for  their  proper  functions " 

"And  do  we  know — have  we  decided — 
yet — what  they  are?"  Miss  Quincey  was 
anxious  to  sustain  her  part  in  the  dialogue 
with  credit. 


i  66  Superseded 

He  stared,  not  at  the  distance  but  at  her. 

"Why,  surely,"  he  said  more  gently,  "to 
be  women  first — to  be  wives  and  mothers." 

She  drew  her  cape  a  little  closer  round  her 
and  turned  from  him  with  half-shut  eyes. 
She  seemed  at  once  to  be  protecting  herself 
against  his  theory  and  blinding  her  sight  to 
her  own  perishing  and  thwarted  woman- 
hood. 

"All  Nature  is  against  it,"  he  said. 

"Nature?"  she  repeated  feebly. 

"Yes,  Nature;  and  she'll  go  her  own  way 
in  spite  of  all  the  systems  that  ever  were. 
Don't  you  know — you  are  a  teacher,  so  you 
ought  to  know — that  overstrain  of  the  high- 
er faculties  is  sometimes  followed  by  astonish- 
ing demonstrations  on  the  part  of  Nature?" 

Miss  Quincey  replied  that  no  cases  of  the 
kind  had  come  under  her  notice. 

"Well — your  profession  ought  to  go 
hand-in-hand  with  mine.  If  you  only  saw 

the  half  of  what  we  see But  you  only 

see  the  process;  we  get  the  results.  By  the 
way  I  must  go  and  look  at  some  of  them." 


Under  a  Blue  Moon         101 

His  words  echoed  madly  in  a  feverish  lit- 
tle brain,  "Ought  to  go — hand-in-hand — 
hand-in-hand  with  mine." 

"Nature  can  be  very  cruel,"  said  she. 

Something  in  her  tone  recalled  him  from 
his  flight.  He  stood  looking  down  at  her, 
thoughtful  and  pitiful.  "And  Nature  can 
be  very  kind;  kinder  than  we  are.  You  are 
a  case  in  point.  Nature  is  trying  to  make 
you  well  against  your  will.  A  little  more 
rest — a  little  more  exercise — a  little  more 
air " 

She  smiled.  Yes,  a  little  more  of  all  the 
things  she  wanted  and  had  never  had.  That 
was  what  her  smile  said  in  its  soft  and  dep- 
recating bitteniess. 

He  held  out  his  hand,  and  she  too  rose, 
shivering  a  little  in  her  thin  dress. 

She  was  the  first  to  hurry  away. 

He  looked  after  her  small  figure,  noted 
her  nervous  gait  and  the  agitated  movement 
of  her  hand  as  the  streamers  on  her  poor 
cape  flapped  and  fluttered,  the  sport  of  the 
unfeeling  wind. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
a  painful  Af0under0tanDfn0 

AND  now,  on  early  evenings  and  Satur- 
day afternoons  when  the  weather  was 
fine,  Miss  Quincey  was  to  be  found  in  Prim- 
rose Hill  Park.  Not  that  anybody  ever 
came  to  look  for  Miss  Quincey.  Neverthe- 
less, whether  she  was  walking  up  and  down 
the  paths  or  sitting  on  a  bench,  Miss  Quincey 
had  a  certain  expectant  air,  as  if  at  any 
moment  Dr.  Cautley  might  come  tearing 
round  the  corner  with  his  coat-tails  flying,  or 
as  if  she  might  look  up  and  find  him  sitting 
beside  her  and  talking  to  her.  But  he  did 
not  come.  There  are  some  histories  that 
never  repeat  themselves. 

And  he  had  never  called  since  that  day — 
Miss  Quincey  remembered  it  well;  it  was 
Saturday  the  thirteenth  of  March.  April 
and  May  went  by;  she  had  not  seen  him  now 

IO2 


A  Painful  Misunderstanding   103 

for  more  than  two  months ;  and  she  began  to 
think  there  must  be  a  reason  for  it. 

At  last  she  saw  him;  she  saw  him  twice 
running.  Once  in  the  park  where  they  had 
sat  together,  and  once  in  the  forked  road 
that  leads  past  that  part  of  St.  Sidwell's 
where  Miss  Cursiter  and  Miss  Vivian  lived 
in  state.  Each  time  he  was  walking  very 
fast  as  usual,  and  he  looked  at  her,  but  he 
never  raised  his  hat;  she  spoke,  but  he 
passed  her  without  a  word.  And  yet  he  had 
recognised  her;  there  could  be  no  possible 
doubt  of  it. 

Depend  upon  it  there  was  a  reason  for 
that.  Miss  Quincey  was  one  of  those  inno- 
cent people  who  believe  that  every  variety  of 
human  behaviour  must  have  a  reason  (as  if 
only  two  months  ago  she  had  not  been 
favoured  with  the  spectacle  of  an  absolutely 
unreasonable  young  man).  To  be  sure  it 
was  not  easy  to  find  one  for  conduct  so 
strange  and  unprecedented,  and  in  any  case 
Miss  Quincey's  knowledge  of  masculine  mo- 
tives was  but  small.  Taken  by  itself  it 


1 04  Superseded 

might  have  passed  without  any  reason,  as  an 
oversight,  a  momentary  lapse;  but  coupled 
with  his  complete  abandonment  of  Camden 
Street  North  it  looked  ominous  indeed.  Not 
that  her  faith  in  Bastian  Cautley  wavered 
for  an  instant.  Because  Bastian  Cautley 
was  what  he  was,  he  could  never  be  guilty 
of  spontaneous  discourtesy;  on  the  other 
hand,  she  had  seen  that  he  could  be  fierce 
enough  on  provocation;  therefore,  she 
argued,  he  had  some  obscure  ground  of 
offence  against  her. 

Miss  Quincey  passed  a  sleepless  night 
reasoning  about  the  reason,  a  palpitating 
never-ending  night,  without  a  doze  or  a 
dream  in  it  or  so  much  as  the  winking  of  an 
eyelid.  She  reasoned  about  it  for  a  week 
between  the  classes,  and  in  her  spare  time 
(when  she  had  any)  in  the  evening  (thus 
running  into  debt  to  Sordcllo  again).  At 
the  end  of  the  week  Miss  Quincey's  mind 
seemed  to  have  become  remarkably  lucid; 
every  thought  in  it  ground  to  excessive 
subtlety  in  the  mill  of  her  logic.  She  saw  it 


A  Painful  Misunderstanding   105 

all  clearly.  There  had  been  some  misunder- 
standing, some  terrible  mistake.  She  had 
forfeited  his  friendship  through  a  blunder 
nameless  but  irrevocable.  Once  or  twice 
she  wondered  if  Mrs.  Moon  could  be  at  the 
bottom  of  it — or  Martha.  Had  her  aunt 
carried  out  her  dreadful  threat  of  giving  him 
a  hint  to  send  in  his  account?  And  had  the 
hint  implied  that  for  the  future  all  accounts 
with  him  were  closed?  Had  he  called  on 
Mrs.  Moon  and  been  received  with  crushing 
hostility?  Or  had  Martha  permitted  herself 
to  say  that  she,  Miss  Quincey,  was  out  when 
perhaps  he  knew  for  a  positive  fact  that  she 
was  in?  But  she  soon  dismissed  these  con- 
jectures as  inadequate  and  fell  back  on  her 
original  hypothesis. 

And  all  the  time  the  Old  Lady's  eyes,  and 
her  voice  too,  were  sharper  than  ever;  from 
the  corner  where  she  dreamed  she  watched 
Miss  Quincey  incessantly  between  the 
dreams.  At  times  the  Old  Lady  was  shaken 
with  terrible  and  mysterious  mirth.  Bastian 
Cautley  began  to  figure  fantastically  in  her 


1 06  Superseded 

conversation.  Her  ideas  travelled  by  slow 
trains  of  association  that  started  from  no- 
where but  always  arrived  at  Bastian  Cautley 
as  a  terminus.  If  Juliana  had  a  headache 
Mrs.  Moon  supposed  that  she  wanted  that 
young  man  to  be  dancing  attendance  on  her 
again;  if  Juliana  sighed  she  declared  that 
Dr.  Cautley  was  a  faithless  swain  who  had 
forsaken  Juliana;  if  Martha  brought  in  the 
tea-tray  she  wondered  when  Dr.  Cautley 
was  coming  back  for  another  slice  of 
Juliana's  wedding-cake.  Mrs.  Moon  re- 
ferred to  a  certain  abominable  piece  of  con- 
fectionery now  crumbling  away  on  a  shelf 
in  the  sideboard,  where,  with  a  breach  in  its 
side  and  its  sugar  turret  in  ruins,  it  seemed 
to  nod  at  Miss  Quincey  with  all  sorts  of 
satirical  suggestions.  And  when  Louisa 
sent  her  accounts  of  Teenie  who  lisped  in 
German,  Alexander  who  wrote  Latin  letters 
to  his  father,  and  Mildred  who  refused  to 
read  the  New  Testament  in  anything  but 
Greek,  and  Miss  Quincey  remarked  that  if 
she  had  children  she  wouldn't  bring  them  up 


A  Painful  Misunderstanding  107 

so,  the  Old  Lady  laughed — "Tehee — Tehee ! 
We  all  know  about  old  maids'  children." 
Miss  Quincey  said  nothing  to  that;  but  she 
hardened  her  heart  against  Louisa's  chil- 
dren, and  against  Louisa's  husband  and 
Louisa.  She  couldn't  think  how  Louisa 
could  have  married  such  a  dreadful  little 
man  as  Andrew  Mackinnon,  with  his  un- 
mistakable accent  and  problematical  linen. 
The  gentle  creature  who  had  never  said  a 
harsh  word  to  anybody  in  her  life  became 
mysteriously  cross  and  captious.  She 
hardened  her  heart  even  to  little  Laura 
Lazarus. 

And  one  morning  when  she  came  upon  the 
Mad  Hatter  in  her  corner  of  the  class-room, 
and  found  her  adding  two  familiar  columns 
of  figures  together  and  adding  them  all 
wrong,  Miss  Quincey  was  very  cross  and 
very  captious  indeed.  The  Mad  Hatter  ex- 
plained at  more  length  than  ever  that  the 
figures  twisted  themselves  about;  they 
wouldn't  stay  still  a  minute  so  that  she  could 
hold  them;  they  were  always  going  on  and 


io8  Superseded 

on,  turning  over  and  over,  and  growing, 
growing,  till  there  were  millions,  billions, 
trillions  of  them;  oh,  they  were  wonderful 
things  those  figures ;  you  could  go  on  watch- 
ing them  for  ever  if  you  were  sharp  enough; 
you  could  even — here  Laura  lowered  her 
voice  in  awe  of  her  own  conception,  for 
Laura  was  a  mystic,  a  seer,  a  metaphysician, 
what  you  will — you  could  even  think  with 
them,  if  you  knew  how;  in  short  you  could 
do  anything  with  them  but  turn  them  into 
sums.  And  as  all  this  was  very  confusing 
to  the  intellect  Miss  Quincey  became  crosser 
than  ever.  And  while  Miss  Quincey  quiv- 
ered all  over  with  irritability,  the  Mad  Hat- 
ter paid  no  heed  whatever  to  her  instruc- 
tions, but  thrust  forward  a  small  yellow  face 
that  was  all  nose  and  eyes,  and  gazed  at  Miss 
Quincey  like  one  possessed  by  a  spirit  of 
divination. 

"Have  you  got  a  headache,  Miss  Quin- 
cey?" she  inquired  on  hearing  herself  ad- 
dressed for  the  third  time  as  "Stupid 
child!" 


A  Painful  Misunderstanding  io() 

Miss  Quincey  relied  tartly  that  no,  she 
had  not  got  a  headache.  The  Mad  Hatter 
appeared  to  be  absorbed  in  tracing  rude 
verses  on  her  rough  notebook  with  a  para- 
lytic pencil. 

"I'm  sorry;  because  then  you  must  be  un- 
happy. When  people  are  cross,"  she  con- 
tinued, "it  means  one  of  two  things.  Either 
their  heads  ache  or  they  are  unhappy.  You 
must  be  very  unhappy.  I  know  all  about 
it."  The  paralytic  pencil  wavered  and  came 
to  a  full  stop.  "You  like  somebody,  and  so 
somebody  has  made  you  unhappy." 

But  for  the  shame  of  it,  Miss  Quincey 
could  have  put  her  head  down  on  the  desk 
and  cried  as  she  had  seen  the  Mad  Hatter 
cry  over  her  sums,  and  for  the  same  reason ; 
because  she  could  not  put  two  and  two  to- 
gether. 

And  what  Mrs.  Moon  saw,  what  Martha 
saw,  what  the  Mad  Hatter  divined  with  her 
feverish,  precocious  brain,  Rhoda  Vivian 
could  not  fail  to  see.  It  was  Dr.  Cautley's 
business  to  look  after  Miss  Quincey  in  her 


lid  Superseded 

illness,  and  it  was  Rhoda's  to  keep  an  eye  ort 
her  in  her  recovery,  and  instantly  report  the 
slightest  threatening  of  a  break-down.  Miss 
Quincey's  somewhat  eccentric  behaviour 
filled  her  with  misgivings;  and  in  order  to 
investigate  her  case  at  leisure,  she  chose  the 
first  afternoon  when  Miss  Cursiter  was  not 
at  home  to  ask  the  little  arithmetic  teacher 
to  lunch. 

After  Rhoda's  lunch,  soothed  with  her 
sympathy  and  hidden,  not  to  say  extin- 
guished, in  an  enormous  chair,  Miss  Quincey 
was  easily  worked  into  the  right  mood  for 
confidences;  indeed  she  was  in  that  state  of 
mind  when  they  rush  out  of  their  own  ac- 
cord in  the  utter  exhaustion  of  the  will. 

"Are  you  sure  you  are  perfectly  well  ?"  so 
Rhoda  began  her  inquiry. 

"Perfectly,  perfectly — in  myself,"  said 
Miss  Quincey,  "I  think,  perhaps — that  is, 
sometimes  I'm  a  little  afraid  that  taking  so 
much  arsenic  may  have  disagreed  with  me. 
You  know  it  is  a  deadly  poison.  But  I've 
left  it  off  lately,  so  I  ought  to  be  better — 


A  Painful  Misunderstanding   1 1 1 

unless  perhaps  I'm  feeling  the  want 
of  it." 

"You  are  not  worrying  about  St.  Sid- 
well's — about  your  work?" 

"It's  not  that — not  that.  But  to  tell  you 
the  truth,  I  am  worried,  Rhoda.  For  some 
reason  or  other,  my  own  fau^t,  no  doubt,  I 
have  lost  a  friend.  It's  a  hard  thing,"  said 
Miss  Quincey,  "to  lose  a  friend." 

"Oh,  I  am  sure — Do  you  mean  Miss 
Cursiter?" 

"No,  I  do  not  mean  Miss  Cursiter." 

"Do  you  mean — me  then?     Not  me?" 

"You,  dear  child?  Never.  To  be  plain 
— this  is  in  confidence,  Rhoda — I  am  speak- 
ing of  Dr.  Cautley." 

"Dr.  Cautley?" 

"Yes.  I  do  not  know  what  I  have  done, 
or  how  I  have  offended  him,  but  he  has  not 
been  near  me  for  over  two  months." 

"Perhaps  he  has  been  busy — in  fact,  I 
know  he  has." 

"He  has  always  been  busy.  It  is  not  that. 
It  is  something — well,  I  hardly  care  to  speak 


1 1  2  Superseded 

of  it,  it  has  been  so  very  painful.  My 
dear" — Miss  Quincey's  voice  sank  to  an 
awful  whisper — "he  has  cut  me  in  the 
street." 

"Oh,  I  know — he  w ill  do  it ;  he  has  done  it 
to  all  his  patients.  He  is  so  dreadfully 
absent-minded." 

If  Miss  Quincey  had  not  been  as  guileless 
as  the  little  old  maid  she  was,  she  would 
have  recognised  these  indications  of  inti- 
macy; as  it  was,  she  said  with  superior  con- 
viction, "My  dear,  I  know  Dr.  Cautley.  He 
has  never  cut  me  before,  and  he  would  not 
do  it  now  without  a  reason.  There  has  been 
some  awful  mistake.  If  I  only  knew  what  I 
had  done !" 

"You've  done  nothing.  I  wouldn't  worry 
if  I  were  you." 

"I  can't  help  worrying.  You  don't  know, 
Rhoda.  The  bitter  and  terrible  part  of  this 
friendship  is,  and  always  has  been,  that  I  am 
under  obligations  to  Dr.  Cautley.  I  owe 
everything  to  him;  I  cannot  tell  you  what  he 
has  done  for  me,  and  here  I  am,  not  allowed, 


A  Painful  Misunderstanding   1 1  3 

and  I  never  shall  be  allowed,  to  do  anything 
for  him."  A  sob  struggled  in  Miss  Quin- 
cey's  throat. 

Rhoda  was  silent.  Did  she  know?  Very 
dimly,  with  a  mere  intellectual  perception, 
but  still  a  great  deal  better  than  the  little 
arithmetic  teacher  could  have  told  her,  she 
understood  the  desire  of  that  innocent  per- 
son, not  for  love,  not  for  happiness,  but  just 
for  leave  to  lay  down  her  life  for  this  friend, 
this  deity  of  hers,  to  be  consumed  in  sacri- 
fice. And  the  bitter  and  terrible  thing  was 
that  she  was  not  allowed  to  do  it.  The 
friend  had  no  use  for  the  life,  the  deity  no 
appetite  for  the  sacrifice. 

"Don't  think  about  it,"  she  said;  it  seemed 
the  best  thing  to  say  in  the  singular  circum- 
stances. "It  will  all  come  right." 

By  this  time  Miss  Quincey  had  got  the 
better  of  the  sob  in  her  throat.  "It  may," 
she  replied  with  dignity;  "but  I  shall  not  be 
the  first  to  make  advances." 

"Advances?  Rather  not.  But  if  I 
thought  he  was  thinking  things — he  isn't, 


1 1 4  Superseded 

you  know,  he's  not  that  sort;  still,  if  I 
thought  it  I  should  have  it  out  with  him." 

"How  could  you  have  it — 'out  with 
him'?" 

"Oh  I  should  just  ask  him  what  he 
thought  of  me;  or  better  still,  tell  him  what 
I  thought  of  him." 

Miss  Quincey  shrank  visibly  from  the  bold 
suggestion. 

"Would  you?  Oh,  that  would  never  do. 
You  won't  mind  my  saying  so,  but  I  think  it 
would  look  a  little  indelicate.  Of  course  it 
would  be  very  different  if  it  were  a  woman; 
if  it  were  you  for  instance." 

"I  should  do  it  any  way.  It's  the 
straightest  thing." 

"I  daresay,  dear,  in  your  friendships  it  is. 
But  I  think  you  can  hardly  judge  of  this. 
You  do  not  know  Dr.  Cautley  as  I  do." 

"No,"  said  Rhoda  meekly,  "perhaps  I 
don't."  Not  for  worlds  would  she  have 
destroyed  that  beautiful  illusion. 

"It  has  been,"  continued  Miss  Quincey, 
"a  very  peculiar,  a  very  interesting  relation- 


A  Painful  Misunderstanding  1 1  $ 

ship.  Strange  too — considering.  If  you 
had  asked  me  six  months  ago  I  should  have 
told  you  that  the  thing  was  impossible,  or 
rather,  that  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten — I  mean 
I  should  have  said  it  was  highly  improbable 
that  Dr.  Cautley  would  take  the  faintest  in- 
terest in  me,  let  alone  like  me." 

"He  does  like  you,  dear  Miss  Quincey,  I 
know  he  does." 

"How  do  you  know  ?" 

"He  told  me  so."  (Miss  Quincey  quiv- 
ered and  a  faint  flush  worked  up  through 
the  sallow  of  her  cheek. )  "And  I'm  sure  he 
would  be  most  distressed  to  think  you  were 
unhappy." 

"It  is  not  unhappiness;  certainly  not  un- 
happiness.  On  the  contrary  I  have  been 
happy,  quite  happy  lately.  And  I  think  it 
has  been  bad  for  me.  I  wasn't  used  to  it. 
Perhaps,  if  it  had  happened  five-and-twenty 

years  ago Do  not  misunderstand  me,  I 

am  merely  speaking  of  friendship,  dear;  but 
it  might — I  mean  I  might " 

Far  back  in  the  chair  and  favoured  bv 


1 1 6  Superseded 

Rhoda's  silence,  Miss  Ouincey  dropped  into 
a  dream.  Presently  she  woke  up  as  it  were 
with  a  start. 

"What  am  I  thinking  of?  Let  us  be 
reasonable;  let  us  reduce  it  to  figures. 
Forty-five — thirty — he  is  thirty.  Take 
twenty-five  from  thirty  and  five  remain. 
Why,  Rhoda,  he  would  have  been " 

They  looked  at  each  other,  but  neither 
said :  "He  would  have  been  five  years  old." 

Miss  Ouincey  seemed  quite  prostrated  by 
the  result  of  her  calculations.  To  every- 
thing that  Rhoda  could  urge  to  soothe  her 
she  answered  steadily : 

"You  do  not  know  him  as  I  do." 

The  voice  was  not  Miss  Quincey's  voice; 
it  was  the  monotonous,  melancholy  voice  of 
the  Fixed  Idea. 

Her  knowledge  of  him.  After  all,  noth- 
ing could  take  from  her  the  exquisite  privacy 
of  that  possession. 

"Eros  anikate  machan,"  said  Rhoda. 
Miss  Quincey  was  gone  and  the  Classical 


A  Painful  Misunderstanding    1 1  y 

Mistress  was  in  school  again,  coaching  a 
backward  student  through  the  "Antigone." 

"Oh  Love,  unconquered  in  fight.  Love 
who — Love  who  fliest,  who  fliest  about 
among  things,"  said  the  student.  And  the 
teacher  laughed. 

Laughed,  for  the  entertaining  blunder 
called  up  a  vivid  image  of  the  god  in  Miss 
Quincey's  drawing-room,  fluttering  about 
among  the  furniture  and  doing  terrific 
damage  with  his  wings. 

"What's  wrong?"  asked  the  student. 

"Oh  nothing;  only  a  slight  confusion  be- 
tween flying  about  and  falling  upon.  'Oh 
Love  who  fallest  on  the  prey';  please  go  on." 

"  'Oh  Love  who  fallest  on  the  prey' " 

The  chorus  mumbled  and  stumbled,  and  the 
student  sighed  heavily,  for  the  Greek  was 

hard.  "He  who  has — he  who  has Oh 

dear,  I  can't  see  any  sense  in  these  old 
choruses;  I  do  hate  them." 

"Still,"  said  Rhoda  sweetly,  "you  mustn't 
murder  them.  'He  who  has  love  has  mad- 
ness.' " 


1 1 8  Superseded 

The  chorus  limped  to  its  end  and  the  stu- 
dent left  the  coach  to  some  curious  reflec- 
tions. 

"Eros  anikate  machan!" 

"Oh  Love,  unconquered  in  fight!"  It 
sang  in  her  ears  persistently,  joyously,  ironi- 
cally— a  wedding-song,  a  battle-song,  a  song 
of  victory. 

Bastian  Cautley  was  right  when  he  said 
that  the  race  was  to  the  swift  and  the  battle 
to  the  strong.  How  eager  she  had  been  for 
the  fight,  how  mad  for  the  crowded  course ! 
She  had  rushed  on,  heat  after  heat,  outstrip- 
ping all  competitors  and  carrying  off  all  the 
crowns  and  the  judges'  compliments  at  the 
end  of  the  day.  She  loved  the  race  for  its 
own  sake,  this  young  athlete;  and  though 
she  took  the  crowns  and  the  compliments 
very  much  as  a  matter  of  course,  she  had 
come  to  look  on  life  as  nothing  but  an  end- 
less round  of  Olympic  games.  And  just  as 
she  forgot  each  successive  event  in  the  ex- 
citement of  the  next,  she  also  had  for- 
gotten the  losers  and  those  who  were  turn- 


A  Painful  Misunderstanding   1 1 9 

bled  in  the  dust.  Until  she  had  seen  Miss 
Quincey. 

Miss  Quincey — so  they  had  let  her  come 
to  this  among  them  all  ?  They  had  left  her 
so  bare  of  happiness  that  the  first  man  (it 
happened  to  be  her  doctor)  who  spoke  two 
kind  words  to  her  became  necessary  to  her 
existence.  No,  that  was  hardly  the  way  to 
put  it;  it  was  underrating  Bastian  Cautley. 

He  was  the  sort  of  man  that  any  woman 

But  who  would  have  thought  it  of  Miss 
Quincey?  And  the  really  sad  thing  was 
that  she  did  not  think  it  of  herself;  it  showed 
how  empty  of  humanity  her  life  had  been. 
It  was  odd  how  these  things  happened. 
Miss  Quincey  was  neither  brilliant  nor  ef- 
ficient, but  she  had  made  the  most  of  herself; 
at  least  she  had  lived  a  life  of  grinding  in- 
tellectual toil ;  the  whole  woman  had  seemed 
absorbed  in  her  miserable  arithmetical  func- 
tion. And  yet  at  fifty  (she  looked  fifty)  she 
had  contrived  to  develop  that  particular 
form  of  foolishness  which  it  was  Miss  Cursi- 
ter's  business  to  exterminate.  There  were 


1 2O  Superseded 

some  of  them  who  talked  as  if  the  thing  was 
done;  as  if  competitive  examinations  had 
superseded  the  primitive  rivalry  of  sex. 

Bastian  Cautley  was  right.  You  may 
go  on  building  as  high  as  you  please,  but  you 
will  never  alter  the  original  ground-plan  of 
human  nature.  And  how  she  had  scoffed 
at  his  "man's  view";  how  indignantly  she 
had  repulsed  his  suggestion  that  there  was  a 
side  to  the  subject  that  her  friends  the  ideal- 
ists were  much  too  ideal  to  see. 

Were  they  really,  as  Bastian  Cautley  put 
it,  so  engrossed  in  producing  a  new  type  that 
they  had  lost  sight  of  the  individual  ?  Was 
the  system  so  far  in  accordance  with  Nature 
that  it  was  careless  of  the  single  life? 
Which  was  the  only  life  open  to  most  of 
them,  poor  things. 

And  she  had  blundered  more  grossly  than 
the  system  itself.  What,  after  all,  had  she 
done  for  that  innocent  whom  she  had  made 
her  friend  ?  She  had  taken  everything  from 
her.  She  had  promised  to  keep  her  place 
for  her  at  St.  Siclwell's  and  was  monopolis- 


A  Painful  Misunderstanding   121 

ing  it  herself.  Worse  than  that,  she  had 
given  her  a  friend  with  one  hand  and 
snatched  him  from  her  with  the  other.  (If 
you  came  to  think  of  it,  it  was  hard  that  she 
who  had  so  much  already  could  have  Bastian 
Cautley  too,  any  day,  to  play  with,  or  to 
keep — for  her  very  own.  There  was  not  a 
bit  of  him  that  could  by  any  possibility  be- 
long to  Miss  Quincey.)  She  had  tried  to 
stand  between  her  and  her  Fate,  and  she  had 
become  her  Fate.  Worse  than  all,  she  had 
kept  from  her  the  knowledge  of  the  truth — 
the  truth  that  might  have  cured  her.  Of 
course  she  had  done  that  out  of  considera- 
tion for  Bastian  Cautley. 

There  it  seemed  that  Rhoda's  regard  for 
his  feelings  ended.  Though  she  admitted 
ten  times  over  that  he  was  right,  she  was  by 
no  means  more  disposed  to  come  to  an  un- 
derstanding with  him  on  that  account.  On 
the  contrary,  when  she  saw  him  the  very 
next  evening  (poor  Bastian  had  chosen  his 
moment  indiscreetly)  she  endeavoured  to  re- 
pair her  blunders  by  visiting  them  on  his  ir- 


122  Superseded 

reproachable  head,  dealing  to  him  a  certain 
painful,  but  not  wholly  unexpected  back- 
hander in  the  face. 

She  had  done  all  she  could  for  Miss  Quin- 
cey.  At  any  rate,  she  said  to  herself,  she 
had  spared  her  the  final  blow. 


CHAPTER  IX 
Cbrougb  tbe  Stethoscope 

OXE  morning  the  Mad  Hatter  was 
madder  than  ever.  It  was  impossible 
to  hold  her  attention.  The  black  eyes 
blazed  as  they  wandered,  the  paralytic  pencil 
was  hot  in  her  burning  fingers.  When  she 
laid  it  down  towards  the  end  of  the  morning 
and  rested  her  head  on  her  hands,  Miss 
Quincey  had  not  the  heart  to  urge  her  to  the 
loathsome  toil.  She  let  her  talk. 

"Miss  Quincey,"  said  the  Mad  Hatter  in 
a  solemn  whisper,  "I'm  going  to  tell  you  a 
secret.  Do  you  see  her?"  She  indicated 
Miss  Rhoda  Vivian  with  the  point  of  her 
pencil. 

It  was  evident  that  Laura  Lazarus  did  not 
adore  the  Classical  Mistress,  and  Rhoda, 
sick  of  her  worshippers,  had  found  this  atti- 
tude refreshing.  Even  now  she  bestowed  a 
123 


1 24  Superseded 

smile  and  a  nod  on  the  Mad  Hatter  that 
would  have  kept  any  other  St.  Sidwellite  in 
a  fortnight's  ecstasy. 

"Laura,  that  is  not  the  way  to  speak  of 
your  teachers." 

The  child  raised  the  Semitic  arch  of  her 
eye-brows.  Her  face  belonged  to  the  type 
formed  from  all  eternity  for  the  expression 
of  contempt. 

"She's  not  my  teacher,  thank  goodness. 
Do  you  know  what  I'm  going  to  be  some 
day,  when  she's  married  and  gone  away? 
I'm  going  to  be  what  she  is — Classical  Mis- 
tress. I  shan't  have  to  do  any  sums  for  that, 
you  know.  I  shall  only  have  to  know  Greek, 
and  isn't  it  a  shame,  Miss  Quincey,  they 
won't  let  me  learn  it  till  I'm  in  the  Fourth, 
and  I  never  shall  be.  But — don't  tell  any 
one — they've  stuck  me  here,  behind  her  now, 
and  when  she's  coaching  that  young  idiot 
Susie  Parker 

"Laura,  that  is  not  the  way  to  speak  of 
your  school-fellows." 

"I  know  it  isn't,  but  she  is,  you  know. 


Through  the  Stethoscope     125 

I've  bought  the  books,  and  I  get  behind  them 
and  I  listen  hard,  and  I  can  read  now. 
What's  more,  I've  done  a  bit  of  a  chorus. 

Look "  The  pariah  took  a  dirty  bit  of 

paper  from  the  breast  of  her  gown.  "It 
goes,  'Oh  Love  unconquered  in  battle/  and 
it's  simply  splendiferous.  Miss  Quincey — 
when  you  like  anything  very  much — or  any- 
body — it  doesn't  matter  which — do  you  turn 
red  all  over?  Do  you  have  creeps  all  down 
your  back?  And  do  you  feel  it  just  here?" 
The  child  clapped  her  yellow  claw  to  Miss 
Quincey's  heart.  "You  do,  you  do,  Miss 
Quincey;  I  can  see  it  go  thump,  I  can  feel  it 
go  thud !" 

She  gazed  into  the  teacher's  face,  and 
again  the  power  of  divination  was  upon  her. 

"Laura!"  Miss  Quincey  gasped;  for  the 
Head  had  been  looming  in  their  neighbour- 
hood, a  deadly  peril,  and  now  she  was  sweep- 
ing down  on  them,  smiling  a  dangerous 
smile. 

"Miss  Quincey,  I  hope  you've  been  mak- 
ing that  child  work,"  said  she  and  passed  on. 


1 26  Superseded 

"I  say!  She  didn't  see  my  verses,  did 
she?  You  won't  let  on  that  I  wrote  them?" 

"You'll  never  write  verses,"  said  Miss 
Quincey,  deftly  improving  a  bad  occasion, 
"if  you  don't  understand  arithmetic.  Why, 
it's  the  science  of  numbers.  Come  now,  if 
ninety  hogsheads " 

"Oh-h!  I'm  so  tired  of  hogsheads; 
mayn't  it  be  firkins  this  time?" 

And,  for  fancy's  sake,  firkins  Miss  Quin- 
cey permitted  it  to  be. 

Now  Rhoda  was  responsible  for  much,  but 
for  what  followed  the  Mad  Hatter  must, 
strictly  speaking,  be  held  accountable. 

Miss  Quincey  had  never  been  greatly  in- 
terested in  the  movements  of  her  heart;  but 
now  that  her  attention  had  been  drawn  to 
them  she  admitted  that  it  was  beating  in  a 
very  extraordinary  way;  there  was  a  decided 
palpitation,  a  flutter. 

That  night  she  lay  awake  and  listened 
to  it. 

It  was  going  diddledy,  diddledy,  like  the 
triplets  in  a  Beethoven  sonata  (only  that  it 


Through  the  Stethoscope     127 

had  no  idea  of  time) ;  then  it  suddenly  left 
off  till  she  put  her  hand  over  it,  when  it  gave 
a  terrifying  succession  of  runaway  knocks. 
Then  it  pretended  that  it  was  going  to  stop 
altogether,  and  Miss  Quincey  implicitly  be- 
lieved it  and  prepared  to  die.  Then  its  tac- 
tics charged;  it  seemed  to  have  shifted  its 
habitation;  to  be  rising  and  rising,  to  be  en- 
tangled with  her  collar-bone  and  struggling 
in  her  throat.  Then  it  sank  suddenly  and 
lay  like  a  lump  of  lead,  dragging  her  down 
through  the  mattress,  and  through  the  bed- 
stead, and  through  the  floor,  down  to  the 
bottom  of  all  things.  Miss  Quincey  did  not 
mind  much;  she  had  been  so  unhappy.  And 
then  it  gave  an  alarming  double-knock  at 
her  ribs,  and  Miss  Quincey  came  to  life 
again  as  unhappy  as  ever. 

And  of  what  it  all  meant  Miss  Quincey 
had  no  more  idea  than  the  man  in  the  moon, 
though  even  the  Mad  Hatter  could  have  told 
her.  Her  heart  went  through  the  same  per- 
formance a  second  and  a  third  night,  and 
Miss  Quincey  said  to  herself  that  if  it 


128  Superseded 

happened  again  she  would  have  to  send  for 
Dr.  Cautley.  Nothing  would  have  induced 
her  to  see  him  for  a  mere  trifle,  but  pride  was 
one  thing  and  prudence  was  another.  . 

It  did  happen  again,  and  she  sent. 

She  may  have  hoped  that  he  would  dis- 
cover something  wrong,  being  dimly  con- 
scious that  her  chance  lay  there,  that 
suffering  constituted  the  incontestable  claim 
on  his  sympathy;  most  distinctly  she  felt  the 
desire  (monstrous  of  course  in  a  woman  of 
no  account)  to  wear  the  aureole  of  pain  for 
its  own  sake ;  to  walk  for  a  little  while  in  the 
glory  and  glamour  of  death.  She  did  not 
want  or  mean  to  give  any  trouble,  to  be  a 
source  of  expense;  she  had  saved  a  little 
money  for  the  supreme  luxury.  But  she 
had  hardly  entertained  the  idea  for  a  mo- 
ment when  she  dismissed  it  as  selfish.  It 
was  her  duty  to  live,  for  the  sake  of  St.  Sid- 
well's  and  of  Mrs.  Moon;  and  she  was  only 
calling  Dr.  Cautley  in  to  help  her  to  do  it. 
But  through  it  all  the  feeling  uppermost  was 
joy  in  the  certainty  that  she  would  see  him 


Through  the  Stethoscope     I  29 

on  an  honourable  pretext,  and  would  be  able 
to  set  right  that  terrible  misunderstanding. 

She  hardly  expected  him  till  late  in  the 
day;  so  she  was  a  little  startled,  when  she 
came  in  after  morning  school,  to  find  Mrs. 
Moon  waiting  for  her  at  the  stairs,  quiver- 
ing with  indignation  that  could  have  but  one 
cause. 

He  had  lost  no  time  in  answering  her 
summons. 

The  drawing-room  door  was  ajar;  the 
Old  Lady  closed  it  mysteriously,  and  pushed 
her  niece  into  the  bedroom  behind. 

"Will  you  tell  me  the  meaning  of  this? 
That  man  has  been  cooling  his  heels  in  there 
for  the  last  ten  minutes,  and  he  says  you  sent 
for  him.  Is  that  the  case?" 

Miss  Quincey  meekly  admitted  that  it  was, 
and  entered  upon  a  vague  description  of  her 
trouble. 

"It's  all  capers  and  nonsense,"  said  the 
Old  Lady,  "there's  nothing  the  matter  with 
your  heart.  You're  just  hysterical,  and  you 
just  want " 


130  Superseded 

"I  want  to  know,  and  Dr.  Cautley  will  tell 
me." 

"Oh  ho !  I  daresay  he'll  find  some  mare's 
nest  fast  enough,  if  you  tell  him  where  to 
look." 

Miss  Quincey  took  off  her  hat  and  cape 
and  laid  them  down  with  a  sigh.  She  gave 
a  terrified  glance  at  the  looking-glass  and 
smoothed  her  thin  hair  with  her  hand. 

"Auntie — I  must  go.  I  can't  keep  him 
waiting  any  longer." 

"Go  then — I  won't  stop  you." 

She  went  trembling,  followed  so  closely 
by  Mrs.  Moon  that  she  looked  like  a  pris- 
oner conducted  to  the  dock. 

"How  will  he  receive  me?"  she  wondered. 

He  received  her  coldly  and  curtly.  There 
was  a  hurry  and  abstraction  in  his  manner 
utterly  unlike  his  former  leisurely  sympathy. 
Many  causes  contributed  to  this  effect;  he 
was  still  all  bruised  and  bleeding  from  the 
blow  dealt  to  him  by  Rhoda's  strong  young 
arm;  an  epidemic  had  kept  him  on  his  legs 
all  day  and  a  great  part  of  the  night;  his 


time  had  never  been  so  valuable,  and  he  had 
been  obliged  to  waste  ten  minutes  of  it  con- 
templating the  furniture  in  that  detestable 
drawing-room.  He  was  worried  and  over- 
worked, and  Miss  Quincey  thought  he  was 
still  offended;  his  very  appearance  made  her 
argue  the  worst.  No  hope  to-day  of  clear- 
ing up  that  terrible  misunderstanding. 

She  tremulously  obeyed  his  first  brief 
order,  one  by  one  undoing  the  buttons  of  her 
dress,  laying  bare  her  poor  chest,  all  flat  and 
formless  as  a  child's.  A  momentary  gentle- 
ness came  over  him  as  he  adjusted  the  tubes 
of  his  stethoscope  and  began  the  sounding, 
backwards  and  forwards  from  heart  to 
lungs,  and  from  lungs  to  heart  again;  while 
the  Old  Lady  looked  on  as  merry  as  Destiny, 
and  nodded  her  head  and  smiled,  as  much  to 
say,  "Tehee-tehee,  what  a  farce  it  is !" 

He  put  up  the  stethoscope  with  a  click. 

"There  is  nothing  the  matter  with  you." 

Mrs.  Moon  gave  out  a  subdued  ironical 
chuckle. 

Miss  Quincey  looked  anxiously  into  his 


\%±  Superseded 

face.  "Do  you  not  think  the  heart — the 
heart  is  a  little ?" 

He  smiled  and  at  the  same  time  he  sighed. 
"Heart's  all  right.  But  you've  left  off  your 
tonic." 

She  had,  she  was  afraid  that  so  much 
poison 

"Poison?"  (He  was  not  in  the  least  of- 
fended.) "Do  you  mean  the  arsenic? 
There  are  some  poisons  you  can't  live  with- 
out; but  you  must  take  them  in  moderation." 

"Will  you — will  you  want  to  see  me 
again  ?" 

"It  will  not  be  necessary." 

At  that  Mrs.  Moon's  chuckle  broke  all 
bounds  and  burst  into  a  triumphant  "Tchee- 
tchee-chee !"  He  went  away  under  cover  of 
it.  It  was  her  way  of  putting  a  pleasant 
face  on  the  matter. 

She  hardly  waited  till  his  back  was  turned 
before  she  delivered  herself  of  that  which 
was  working  within  her. 

"I  tell  you  what  it  is,  Juliana;  you're  a 
silly  woman." 


Through  the  Stethoscope     133 

Miss  Ouincey  looked  up  with  a  faint  pre- 
monitory fear.  Her  fingers  began  nerv- 
ously buttoning  and  unbuttoning  her  dress 
bodice;  while  half-dressed  and  shivering  she 
waited  the  attack. 

"And  a  pretty  exhibition  you've  made  of 
yourself  this  day.  Anybody  might  have 
thought  you  wanted  to  let  that  young  man 
see  what  was  the  matter  with  you." 

"So  I  did.  He  says  there  is  nothing  the 
matter  with  me." 

"Nothing  the  matter  with  you,  indeed! 
He  knows  well  enough  what's  the  matter 
with  you." 

The  victim  was  staring  now,  with  terror 
in  her  tired  eyes.  Her  mouth  dropped  open 
with  the  question  her  tongue  refused  to 
utter. 

"If  you,"  continued  Mrs.  Moon,  "had 
wanted  to  tell  him  plainly  that  you  were  in 
love  with  him,  you  couldn't  have  set  about  it 
better.  I  should  have  thought  you'd  have 
been  ashamed  to  look  him  in  the  face — at 
your  age.  You're  a  disgrace  to  my  family !" 


1 34  Superseded 

The  poor  fingers  ceased  their  labour  of 
buttoning-  and  unbuttoning;  Miss  Quincey 
sat  with  her  shoulders  naked  as  it  were  to 
the  lash. 

"There!"  said  Mrs.  Moon  with  an  air  of 
drawing  back  the  whip  and  putting  it  by  for 
the  present.  "If  I  were  you  I'd  cover  myself 
up,  and  not  sit  there  catching  cold  with  my 
dress-body  off." 


CHAPTER  X 

Okies  QUIUCCY?  Staudd 

AS  it  happened  on  a  Saturday  morning 
she  had  plenty  of  time  to  think  about 
it.  All  the  afternoon  and  the  evening  and 
the  night  lay  before  her;  she  was  powerless 
to  cope  with  Sunday  and  the  night  beyond 
that. 

The  remarkable  revelation  made  to  her  by 
Mrs.  Moon  was  so  great  a  shock  that  her 
mind  refused  to  realize  it  all  at  once.  It  was 
an  outrage  to  all  the  meek  reticences  and 
chastities  of  her  spirit.  But  she  owned  its 
truth ;  she  saw  it  now,  the  thing  they  all  had 
seen,  that  she  only  could  not  see. 

She  had  sinned  the  sin  of  sins,  the  sin  of 
youth  in  middle-age. 

Now  it  was  not  imagination  in  Miss  Quin- 
cey,  so  much  as  the  tradition  of  St.  Sidwell's, 
that  gave  her  innocent  affection  the  propor- 
135 


136  Superseded 

tions  of  a  crime.  Miss  Quincey  had  lived 
all  her  life  in  ignorance  of  her  own  nature, 
having  spent  the  best  part  of  five-and-forty 
years  in  acquiring  other  knowledge.  She 
had  nothing  to  go  upon,  for  she  had  never 
been  young;  or  rather  she  had  treated  her 
youth  unkindly,  she  had  fed  it  on  saw-dust 
and  given  it  nothing  but  arithmetic  books  to 
play  with,  so  that  its  experiences  were  of  no 
earthly  use  to  her. 

And  now,  if  they  had  only  let  her  alone, 
she  might  have  been  none  the  wiser;  her 
folly  might  have  put  on  many  quaint  dis- 
guises, friendship,  literary  sympathy,  intel- 
lectual esteem — there  were  a  thousand 
delicate  subterfuges  and  innocent  hypocri- 
sies, and  under  any  one  of  them  it  might  have 
crept  about  unchallenged  in  the  shadows  and 
blind  alleys  of  thought.  As  love  pure  and 
simple,  if  it  came  to  that,  there  was  no  harm 
in  it.  Many  an  old  maid,  older  than  she, 
has  just  such  a  secret  folded  up  and  put 
away  all  sweet  and  pure ;  the  poor  lady  does 
not  call  it  love,  but  remembrance,  which  is 


Miss  Quincey  Stands  Back    137 

so  to  speak  love  laid  in  lavender;  and  she — 
who  knows?  She  might  have  contrived  a 
little  shrine  for  it  somewhere;  she  had  al- 
ways understood  that  love  was  a  holy  thing. 

Unfortunately,  when  a  holy  thing  has 
been  pulled  about  and  dragged  in  the  mud, 
it  may  be  as  holy  as  ever  but  it  will  never 
look  the  same.  In  Miss  Quincey's  case  - 
mortal  passion  had  been  shaken  out  of  its 
sleep  and  forced  to  look  at  itself  before  it 
had  time  to  put  on  a  shred  of  immortality. 
In  the  sudden  glare  it  stood  out  monstrous, 
naked  and  ashamed ;  she  herself  had  helped 
to  deprive  it  of  all  the  delicacies  and  ameni- 
ties that  made  it  tolerable  to  thought.  With 
her  own  hands  she  had  delivered  it  up  to  the 
stethoscope. 

He  knew,  he  knew.  In  the  mad  rush  of 
her  ideas  one  sentence  detached  itself  from 
the  torrent.  "Pic  knows  well  enough  what's 
the  matter  with  you." 

The  nature  of  the  crime  was  such  that 
there  was  no  possibility  of  explanation  or 
defence  against  the  accuser  whose  condem- 


138  Superseded 

nation  weighed  heaviest  on  her  soul.  He 
loomed  before  her,  hovered  over  her,  with 
the  tubes  of  the  heart-probing  stethoscope 
in  his  ears  (as  a  matter  of  fact  they  gave  him 
a  somewhat  grotesque  appearance,  remotely 
suggestive  of  a  Hindoo  idol;  but  Miss  Quin- 
cey  had  not  noticed  that) ;  his  bumpy  fore- 
head was  terrible  with  intelligence;  his  eyes 
were  cold  and  comprehensive;  the  smile  of  a 
foregone  conclusion  flickered  on  his  lips. 

He  must  have  known  it  all  the  time. 
There  never  had  been  any  misunderstanding. 
That  was  the  clue  to  his  conduct;  that  was 
the  reason  why  he  had  left  off  coming  to  the 
house;  for  he  was  the  soul  of  delicacy  and 
honour.  And  yet  she  had  never  said  a  word 

that  might  be  interpreted He  must  have 

seen  it  in  her  face,  then, — that  day — when 
she  allowed  herself  to  sit  with  him  in  the 
park.  She  remembered — things  that  he  had 
said  to  her — did  they  mean  that  he  had  seen? 
She  saw  it  all  as  he  had  seen  it.  "Delicacy" 
and  "honour"  indeed!  Disgust  and  con- 
tempt would  be  more  likely  feelings. 


Miss  Quincey  Stands  Back    139 

She  lay  awake  all  Saturday  night  and  all 
Sunday  night,  until  four  o'clock  on  Monday 
morning;  always  reviewing  the  situation, 
always  going  over  the  same  patch  of  ground 
in  the  desperate  hope  of  finding  so.ne  place 
where  her  self-respect  could  rest,  and  dis- 
covering nothing  but  the  traces  of  her  guilty 
feet.  A  subtler  woman  would  have  flour- 
ished lightly  over  the  territory,  till  she  had 
whisked  away  every  vestige  of  her  trail;  an- 
other would  have  seen  the  humour  of  the 
situation  and  blown  the  whole  thing  into  the 
inane  with  a  burst  of  healthy  laughter;  but 
subtlety  and  humour  were  not  Miss  Quin- 
cey's  strong  points.  She  could  do  nothing 
but  creep  shivering  to  bed  and  lie  there,  face 
to  face  with  her  own  enormity. 

On  Monday  morning  and  on  many  morn- 
ings after  she  crept  out  into  the  street 
stealthily,  like  a  criminal  seeking  some 
shelter  where  she  could  hide  her  head.  She 
acquired  a  habit — odd  enough  to  the  casual 
onlooker — of  slinking  cautiously  round 
every  turning  and  rushing  every  crossing 


140  Superseded 

in  her  abject  terror  of  meeting  Bastian 
Cautley. 

There  was  nobody  to  tell  her  that  it  would 
not  matter  if  she  did  meet  him;  no  cheerful 
woman  of  the  world  to  smile  in  her 
frightened  face  and  say:  "My  dear  Miss 
Quincey,  there  is  nothing  remarkable  in  this. 
We  all  do  it,  sooner  or  later.  Too  late? 
Not  a  bit  of  it;  better  too  late  than  never, 
and  if  it's  that  Cautley  man  I'm  sure  I  don't 
wonder.  I'm  in  love  with  him  myself. 
Lost  your  self-respect,  have  you?  Self-re- 
spect, indeed,  why  bless  your  soul,  you  are 
all  the  nicer  for  it.  As  for  hiding  your  head 
I  never  heard  such  rubbish  in  my  life.  No- 
body is  looking  at  you — certainly  not  the 
Cautley  man.  In  fact,  to  tell  you  the  truth, 
at  this  moment  he  is  particularly  engaged  in 
looking  the  other  way." 

But  Miss  Quincey  did  not  know  that  lady. 
She  knew  no  one  but  Rhoda  and  Mrs. 
Moon;  and  if  Mrs.  Moon  was  too  old, 
Rhoda  was  too  young  to  take  that  view;  be- 
sides, Mrs.  Moon  was  not  a  woman  of  the' 


Miss  Quincey  Stands  Back    14! 

world  and  no  ridiculous  delicacy  prompted 
her  to  look  the  other  way.  In  any  case 
Juliana's  state  of  mind,  advertised  as  it  was 
by  her  complexion  and  many  eccentricities 
of  behaviour,  could  not  have  escaped  her 
notice. 

The  Old  Lady  had  reverted  to  her  former 
humorous  attitude,  and  was  trying  whether 
Juliana's  state  of  mind  would  not  yield  to 
skilfully  directed  banter.  In  these  tactics 
she  was  not  left  unsupported.  Louisa  had 
written  a  long  letter  about  her  husband  and 
her  children,  with  a  postscript. 

"P.S. — I  don't  half  like  what  you  tell  me 
about  Juliana  and  Dr.  C .  For  good- 
ness' sake  don't  encourage  her  in  any  of  that 
nonsense.  Sit  on  it.  Laugh  her  out  of 
it.  I  agree  with  you  that  it  would  be 
better  if  she  cultivated  her  mind  a  little 
more. 

"P.P.S. — Andrew  has  just  come  in.  He 
says  we  oughtn't  to  call  her  Juliana,  but 
Fooliana." 


142  Superseded 

So  laughed  Louisa,  the  married  woman. 

And  Fooliana  she  was  called.  The  joke 
was  quite  unworthy  of  the  Greek  Professor's 
reputation,  but  for  Mrs.  Moon's  purposes  he 
could  hardly  have  made  a  better  one. 

Louisa  had  put  a  terrible  weapon  into  the 
Old  Lady's  hands.  It  was  many  weapons 
in  one.  It  could  be  turned  on  in  all  its  broad! 
robust  humour — "Fooliana!"  Or  refined 
away  into  a  playful  or  delicate  suggestion, 
pointed  with  an  uplifted  finger — "Fooli !" 
Or  cut  down  and  compressed  into  its  es- 
sential meaning — 'Tool !" 

But  whichever  missile  came  handy,  the 
effect  was  much  the  same.  Juliana's  com- 
plexion grew  redder  or  grayer,  but  her  state 
of  mind  remained  unchanged.  Sometimes 
the  Old  Lady  tried  a  graver  method. 

"If  you  would  cultivate  your  mind  a  little 
in  the  evenings  you  would  have  no  time  for 
all  this  nonsense." 

But  Juliana  had  abandoned  the  cultivation 
of  her  mind.  She  made  no  attempt  to  pay 
off  that  small  outstanding  debt  to  Sordello. 


Miss  Quincey  Stands  Back     143 

There  was  an  end  of  the  intellectual  life; 
for  the  living  wells  of  literature  were 
tainted;  Browning  had  become  a  bitter 
memory  and  Tennyson  a  shame. 

But  if  Miss  Quincey  had  no  heart  for 
General  Culture,  she  was  busier  than  ever  in 
the  discharge  of  her  regular  duties.  At  the 
end  of  the  midsummer  term  the  pressure  on 
the  staff  was  heavy.  Her  work  had  grown 
with  the  growth  of  St.  Sidwell's,  and  the  pile 
of  marble  and  granite  copy-books  rose 
higher  than  ever;  it  was  monumental,  and 
Miss  Quincey  was  glad  enough  to  bury  her 
grief  under  it  for  a  time.  Indeed  it  looked 
as  if  in  St.  Sidwell's  she  had  found  the  shel- 
ter where  she  could  hide  her  head;  and  a 
very  desirable  shelter  too,  as  long  as  Mrs. 
Moon  continued  in  that  lively  temper. 
Gradually  she  began  to  realize  that  of  all 
those  five  hundred  pairs  of  eyes  there  was 
none  that  had  discovered  her  secret;  that  not 
one  of  those  busy  brains  was  occupied  with 
her  affairs.  It  was  a  relief  to  lose  herself 
among  them  all  and  be  of  no  account  again. 


144  Superseded 

In  the  corner  behind  Rhoda  Vivian  she  and 
the  Mad  Hatter  seemed  to  be  clinging  to- 
gether more  than  ever  in  an  ecstasy  of 
isolation. 

After  all,  above  the  turmoil  of  emotion  a 
little  tremulous,  attenuated  ideal  was  trying 
to  raise  its  head.  Her  duty.  She  dimly 
discerned  a  possibility  of  deliverance,  of 
purification  from  her  sin.  Therefore  she 
clung  more  desperately  than  ever  to  her  post. 
Seeing  that  she  had  served  the  system  for 
five-and-twenty  years,  it  was  hard  if  she 
could  not  get  from  it  a  little  protection 
against  her  own  weakness,  if  she  could  not 
claim  the  intellectual  support  it  professed  to 
give.  It  was  the  first  time  she  had  ever  put 
it  to  the  test.  If  she  could  only  stay  on  an- 
other year  or  two 

And  now  at  the  very  end  of  the  midsum- 
mer term  it  really  looked  as  if  St.  Sid  well's 
was  anxious  to  keep  her.  Everybody  was 
curiously  kind;  the  staff  cast  friendly  glances 
on  her  as  she  sat  in  her  corner;  Rhoda  was 
almost  passionate  in  her  tenderness.  Even 


Miss  Quincey  Stands  Back    145 

Miss  Cursiter  seemed  softened.  She  had 
left  off  saying  "Stand  back,  Miss  Quincey, 
if  you  please";  and  Miss  Quincey  began  to 
wonder  what  it  all  meant. 

She  was  soon  to  know. 

One  night,  the  last  of  the  term,  the  Clas- 
sical Mistress  was  closeted  with  the  Head. 
Rhoda,  elbow-deep  in  examination  papers, 
had  been  critically  considering  seventy 
variously  ingenious  renderings  of  a  certain 
chorus,  when  the  sudden  rapping  of  a  pen  on 
the  table  roused  her  from  her  labours. 

"You  must  see  for  yourself,  Rhoda,  how 
we  are  placed.  We  must  keep  up  to  a  cer- 
tain standard  of  efficiency  in  the  staff.  Miss 
Quincey  is  getting  past  her  work." 

(Rhoda  became  instantly  absorbed  in 
sharpening  a  pencil. ) 

"For  the  last  two  terms  she  has  been  con- 
stantly breaking  down;  and  now  I'm  very 
much  afraid  she  is  breaking — up." 

The  Head  remained  solemnly  unconscious 
of  her  own  epigram. 

"No    wonder,"    said    Rhoda    to    herself, 


146  Superseded 

"first  love  at  fifty  is  new  wine  in  old  bottles; 
everybody  knows  what  happens  to  the 
bottles." 

The  flush  and  the  frown  on  the  Classical 
Mistress's  face  might  have  been  accounted 
for  by  the  sudden  snapping  of  the  pencil. 

"You  see,"  continued  Miss  Cursiter,  as  if 
defending  herself  from  some  accusation  con- 
veyed by  the  frown,  "as  it  is  we  have 
kept  her  on  a  long  while  for  her  sister's 
sake." 

(A  murmur  from  the  Classical  Mistress.) 

"Of  course  we  must  put  it  to  her  prettily, 
wrap  it  up — in  tissue  paper." 

(The  Classical  Mistress  still  inarticulate.) 

"You  are  not  giving  me  your  opinion." 

"It  seems  to  me  I've  said  a  great  deal 
more  than  I've  any  right  to  say." 

"Oh  you.  We  know  all  about  that.  I 
asked  for  your  opinion." 

"And  when  I  gave  it  you  told  me  I  was 
under  an  influence." 

"What  if  I  did?  And  what  if  it  were 
so?" 


Miss  Quincey  Stands  Back    147 

"What  indeed  ?  You  would  get  the  bene- 
fit of  two  opinions  instead  of  one." 

Now  if  Miss  Cursiter  were  thinking  of 
Dr.  Cautley  there  was  some  point  in  what 
Rhoda  said;  for  in  the  back  of  her  mind  the 
Head  had  a  curious  respect  for  masculine 
judgment. 

"There  can  be  no  two  opinions  about  Miss 
Quincey." 

"I  don't  know.  Miss  Quincey,"  said 
Rhoda  thoughtfully  to  her  pencil,  "is  a  large 
subject." 

"Yes;  if  you  mean  that  Miss  Quincey  is  a 
terrible  legacy  from  the  past.  The  question 
for  me  is — how  long  am  I  to  let  her  hamper 
our  future?" 

"The  future?  It  strikes  me  that  we're 
not  within  shouting  distance  of  the  future. 
We  talk  as  if  we  could  see  the  end;  and 
we're  nowhere  near  it;  we're  in  all  the 
muddle  of  the  middle — that's  why  we're 
hampered  with  Miss  Quincey  and  other  in- 
teresting relics  of  the  past." 

"We  are  slowly  getting  rid  of  them." 


148  Superseded 

At  that  Rhoda  blazed  up.  She  was 
young,  and  she  was  reckless,  and  she  had  too 
many  careers  open  to  her  to  care  much  about 
consequences.  Miss  Cursiter  had  asked  for 
her  opinion  and  she  should  have  it  with  a 
vengeance. 

"It's  not  enough  to  get  rid  of  them.  We 
ought  to  provide  for  them.  Who  or  what 
do  we  provide  for,  if  it  comes  to  that? 
We're  always  talking  about  specialisation, 
and  the  fact  is  we  haven't  specialised  enough. 
Don't  we  give  the  same  test  papers  to  every- 
body?" 

"I  shall  be  happy  to  set  separate  papers 
for  each  girl  if  you'll  undertake  to  correct 
them." 

The  more  Rhoda  fired  the  more  Miss 
Cursiter  remained  cold. 

"That's  just  it — we  couldn't  if  we  tried. 
We  know  nothing  about  each  girl.  That's 
where  we  shall  have  to  specialise  in  the 
future  if  we're  to  do  any  good.  We've 
specialised  enough  with  our  teachers  and 
our  subjects;  chipped  and  chopped  till  we 


Miss  Quincey  Stands  Back    149 

can't  divide  them  any  more;  and  we've  taken 
our  girls  in  the  lump.  We  know  less  about 
them  than  they  do  themselves.  As  for  the 
teachers " 

"Which  by  the  way  brings  us  back  to  Miss 
Quincey." 

"Everything  brings  us  back  to  Miss  Quin- 
cey. Miss  Quincey  will  be  always  with 
us." 

"We  must  put  younger  women  in  her 
place." 

Rhoda  winced  as  though  Miss  Cursiter 
had  struck  her. 

"They  will  soon  grow  old.  Our  profes- 
sion is  a  cruel  one.  It  uses  up  the  finest  and 
most  perishable  parts  of  a  woman's  nature. 
It  takes  the  best  years  of  her  life — and 
throws  the  rest  away." 

"Yet  thousands  of  women  are  willing  to 
take  it  up,  and  leave  comfortable  homes  to 
do  it  too." 

"Yes,"  sighed  Rhoda,  "it's  the  rush  for 
the  open  door." 

"My   dear   Rhoda,   the   women's   labour 


150  Superseded 

market  is  the  same  as  every  other.  The  best 
policy  is  the  policy  of  the  open  door.  Don't 
you  see  that  the  remedy  is  to  open  it  wider — 
wider!" 

"And  when  we've  opened  all  the  doors  as 
wide  as  ever  they'll  go,  what  then  ?  Where 
are  we  going  to  ?" 

"I  can't  tell  you."  Miss  Cursiter  looked 
keenly  at  her.  "Do  you  mean  that  you'll  go 
no  further  unless  you  know  ?" 

Rhoda  was  silent. 

"There  are  faults  in  the  system.  I  can 
see  that  as  well  as  you,  perhaps  better.  I 
am  growing  old  too,  Rhoda.  But  you  are 
youth  itself.  It  is  women  like  you  we  want 
— to  save  us.  Are  you  going  to  turn  your 
back  on  us  ?" 

Miss  Cursiter  bore  down  on  her  with  her 
steady  gaze,  a  gaze  that  was  a  menace  and 
an  appeal,  and  Rhoda  gave  a  little  gasp  as  if 
for  breath. 

"I  can't  go  any  farther." 

"Do  you  realize  what  this  means?  You 
are  not  a  deserter  from  the  ranks.  It  is  the 


Miss  Quincey  Stands  Back    151 

second  in  command  going  over  to  the 
enemy." 

The  words  were  cold,  but  there  was  a  fiery 
court-martial  in  Miss  Cursiter's  eyes  that 
accused  and  condemned  her.  If  Rhoda  had 
been  dashing  her  head  against  the  barrack 
\valls  her  deliverance  was  at  hand.  It 
seemed  that  she  could  never  strike  a  blow  for 
Miss  Quincey  without  winning  the  battle  for 
herself. 

"I  can't  help  it,"  said  she.  "I  hate  it— I 
hate  the  system." 

"The  system?  Suppose  you  do  away 
with  it — do  away  with  every  woman's  col- 
lege in  the  kingdom — have  you  anything  to 
put  in  its  place  ?" 

"No.  I  have  nothing  to  put  in  its 
place." 

"Ah,"  said  Miss  Cursiter,  "you  are  older 
than  I  thought." 

Rhoda  smiled.  By  this  time,  wrong  or 
right,  she  was  perfectly  reckless.  If  every- 
body was  right  .in  rejecting  Miss  Quincey, 
there  was  rapture  in  being  wildly  and  wil- 


152  Superseded 

fully  in  the  wrong.  She  had  flung  up  the 
game. 

Miss  Cursiter  saw  it.  "I  was  right,"  said 
she.  "You  are  under  an  influence,  and  a 
dangerous  one." 

"Perhaps — but,  influence  for  influence'' 
(here  Rhoda  returned  Miss  Cursiter's  gaze 
intrepidly),  "I'm  not  far  wrong.  I  honestly 
think  that  if  we  persist  in  turning  out  these 
intellectual  monstrosities  we  shall  hand  over 
worse  incompetents  than  Miss  Quincey  to 
the  next  generation." 

Rhoda  was  intrepid;  all  the  same  she  red- 
dened as  she  realized  what  a  mouthpiece  she 
had  become  for  Bastian  Cautley's  theories 
and  temper. 

"My  dear  Rhoda,  you're  an  intellectual 
monstrosity  yourself." 

"I  know.  And  in  another  twenty  years' 
time  they'll  want  to  get  rid  of  me" 

"Of  me  too,"  thought  the  Head.  Miss 
Cursiter  felt  curiously  old  and  worn.  She 
had  invoked  Rhoda's  youth  and  it  had  risen 


Miss  Quincey  Stands  Back    153 

up  against  her.  Influence  for  influence,  her 
power  was  dead. 

Rhoda  had  talked  at  length  in  the  hope  of 
postponing  judgment  in  Miss  Quincey's 
case;  now  she  was  anxious  to  get  back  to 
Miss  Quincey,  to  escape  judgment  in  her 
own. 

"And  how  about  Miss  Quincey?"  she 
asked. 

Miss  Cursiter  had  nothing  to  say  about 
Miss  Quincey.  She  had  done  with  that  sec- 
tion of  her  subject.  She  understood  that 
Rhoda  had  said  in  effect,  "If  Miss  Quincey 
goes,  I  go  too."  Nevertheless  her  mind  was 
made  up;  in  tissue  paper,  all  ready  for  Miss 
Quincey. 

Unfortunately  tissue  paper  is  more  or  less 
transparent,  and  Miss  Quincey  had  no  dif- 
ficulty in  perceiving  the  grounds  of  her  dis- 
missal when  presented  to  her  in  this  neat 
way.  Not  even  when  Miss  Cursiter  said  to 
her,  at  the  close  of  the  interview  they  had 
early  the  next  morning,  "For  your  own  sake, 


1 54  Superseded 

dear  Miss  Quincey,  I  feel  we  must  forego 
your  valuable — most  valuable  services." 

Miss  Cursiter  hesitated,  warned  by  some- 
thing- in  the  aspect  of  the  tiny  woman  who 
had  been  a  thorn  in  her  side  so  long.  Some- 
how, for  this  occasion,  the  most  incom- 
petent, most  insignificant  member  of  her 
staff  had  contrived  to  clothe  herself  with  a 
certain  nobility.  She  was  undeniably  the 
more  dignified  of  the  two. 

The  Head,  usually  so  eloquent  at  great 
moments,  found  actual  difficulty  in  getting 
to  the  end  of  her  next  sentence. 

"What  I  was  thinking  of — really  again 
entirely  for  your  own  sake — was  whether  it 
would  not  be  better  for  you  to  take  a  little 
longer  holiday.  I  do  feel  in  your  case  the 
imperative  necessity  for  rest.  Indeed  if  you 
found  that  you  wished  to  retire  at  the  end  of 
the  holidays — of  course  receiving  your 
salary  for  the  term " 

Try  as  she  would  to  speak  as  though  she 
were  conferring  a  benefit,  the  Head  had  the 
unmistakable  air  of  asking  a  favour  from 


Miss  Quincey  Stands  Back    155 

her  subordinate,  of  imploring  her  help  in  a 
delicate  situation,  of  putting  it  to  her 
honour. 

Miss  Quincey's  honour  was  more  than 
equal  to  the  demand  made  on  it.  She  had 
sunk  so  low  in  her  own  eyes  lately  that  she 
was  glad  to  gain  some  little  foothold  for  her 
poor  pride.  She  faced  Miss  Cursiter 
bravely  with  her  innocent  dim  eyes  as  she 
answered :  "I  am  ready  to  go,  Miss  Cursiter, 
whenever  it  is  most  convenient  to  you;  but  I 
cannot  think  of  taking  payment  for  work  I 
have  not  done." 

"My  dear  Miss  Quincey,  the  rule  is  al- 
ways a  term's  notice — or  if — if  any  other  ar- 
rangement is  agreed  upon,  a  term's  salary. 
There  can  be  no  question — you  must  really 
allow  me " 

There  Miss  Cursiter's  address  failed  her 
and  her  voice  faltered.  She  had  extracted 
the  thorn ;  but  it  had  worked  its  way  deeper 
than  she  knew,  and  the  operation  was  a  pain- 
ful one.  A  few  compliments  on  the  part  of 
the  Head,  and  the  hope  that  St.  Sidwell's 


156  Superseded 

would  not  lose  sight  of  Miss  Quincey  alto- 
gether, and  the  interview  was  closed. 

It  was  understood  by  the  end  of  the  morn- 
ing that  Miss  Quincey  had  sent  in  her  resig- 
nation. The  news  spread  from  class  to 
class — "Miss  Quincey  is  going" — and  was 
received  by  pupils  and  teachers  with  cries  of 
incredulity.  After  all,  Miss  Quincey  be- 
longed to  St.  Sidwell's;  she  was  part  and 
parcel  of  the  place ;  her  blood  and  bones  had 
been  built  into  its  very  walls,  and  her  re- 
moval was  not  to  be  contemplated  without 
dismay.  Why,  what  would  a  procession  be 
like  without  Miss  Quincey  to  enliven  it? 

And  so,  as  she  went  her  last  round,  a  score 
of  hands  that  had  never  clasped  hers  in 
friendship  were  stretched  out  over  the  desks 
in  a  wild  leave-taking;  three  girls  had  tears 
in  their  eyes;  one,  more  emotional  than  the 
rest,  sobbed  audibly  without  shame.  The 
staff  were  unanimous  in  their  sympathy  and 
regret.  Rhoda  withdrew  hastily  from  the 
painful  scene.  Only  the  Mad  Hatter  in  her 
corner  made  no  sign.  She  seemed  to  take 


Miss  Quincey  Stands  Back    157 

the  news  of  Miss  Qttincey's  departure  with 
a  resigned  philosophy. 

"Well,  little  Classical  Mistress,"  said  Miss 
Quincey,  "we  must  say  good-bye.  You 
know  I'm  going." 

The  child  nodded  her  small  head.  "Of 
course  you're  going.  I  might  have  known 
it.  I  did  know  it  all  along.  You  were 
booked  to  go." 

"Why,  Laura?"  Miss  Quincey  was  mys- 
tified and  a  little  hurt. 

"Because" — a  sinister  convulsion  passed 
over  the  ugly  little  pariah  face — "because" 
— the  Mad  Hatter  had  learnt  the  force  of 
under-statement — "because  I  like  you." 

At  that  Miss  Quincey  broke  down.  "My 
dear  little  girl — I  am  going  because  I  am  too 
old  to  stay." 

"Write  to  me,  dear,"  she  said  at  the  last 
moment ;  "let  me  know  how  you  are  getting 
on." 

But  she  never  knew.  The  Mad  Hatter 
did  not  write.  In  fact  she  never  wrote  any- 
thing again,  not  even  verses.  She  was 


158  Superseded 

handed  over  next  term  to  Miss  Quincey's 
brilliant  and  efficient  successor,  who  made 
her  work  hard,  with  the  result  that  the  Mad 
Hatter  got  ill  of  a  brain  fever  just  before 
the  Christmas  holidays  and  was  never  fit  for 
any  more  work ;  and  never  became  Classical 
Mistress  or  anything  else  in  the  least  dis- 
tinguished. But  this  is  by  the  way. 

As  the  College  clock  struck  one,  Miss 
Quincey  walked  home  as  usual  and  went  up 
into  her  bedroom  without  a  word.  She 
opened  a  drawer  and  took  from  it  her  Post 
Office  Savings  Bank  book  and  looked  over 
her  account.  There  stood  to  her  credit  the 
considerable  sum  of  twenty-seven  pounds 
four  shillings  and  eight  pence.  No,  not 
quite  that,  for  the  blouse,  the  abominable 
blouse,  had  been  paid  for  out  of  her  savings 
and  it  had  cost  a  guinea.  Twenty-six 
pounds  three  shillings  and  eight  pence  was 
all  that  she  had  saved  in  five-and-twenty 
years.  This,  with  the  term's  salary  which 
Miss  Cursiter  had  insisted  on,  was  enough 
to  keep  her  going  for  a  year.  And  a  year 


Miss  Quincey  Stands  Back    159 

is  a  long  time.  She  came  slowly  downstairs 
to  the  drawing-room  where  her  aunt  was 
dozing  and  dreaming  in  her  chair.  There 
still  hung  about  her  figure  the  indefinable 
dignity  that  had  awed  Miss  Cursiter.  If 
she  was  afraid  of  Mrs.  Moon  she  was  too 
proud  to  show  her  fear. 

"This  morning,"  she  said  simply,  "I  re- 
ceived my  dismissal." 

The  old  lady  looked  up  dazed,  not  with  the 
news  but  with  her  dream.  Miss  Quincey 
repeated  her  statement. 

"Do  you  mean  you  are  not  going  back  to 
that  place  there  ?"  she  asked  mildly. 

"I  am  never  going  back." 

Still  with  dignity  she  waited  for  the  burst 
of  feeling  she  felt  to  be  justifiable  in  the  cir- 
cumstances. None  came ;  neither  anger,  nor 
indignation,  nor  contempt,  not  even  sur- 
prise. In  fact  the  Old  Lady  was  smiling 
placidly,  as  she  was  wont  to  smile  under  the 
spell  of  the  dream. 

Slowly,  very  slowly,  it  was  dawning  upon 
her  that  the  reproach  had  been  taken  away 


1 60  Superseded 

from  the  memory  of  Tollington  Moon. 
Henceforth  his  niece  Miss  Quincey  would  be 
a  gentlewoman  at  large.  At  the  same  time 
it  struck  her  that  after  all  poor  Juliana  did 
not  look  so  very  old. 

"Very  well  then,"  said  she,  "if  I  were  you 
I  should  put  on  that  nice  silk  blouse  in  the 
evenings." 


CHAPTER  XI 
Dr.  Cautleg  Sen&0  in  1bi0  JBill 

I    WONDER,"    Mrs.    Moon    observed 
suddenly  one  morning,  "if  that  man  is 
going  to  let  his  bill  run  on  to  the  day  of 
judgment?" 

The  Old  Lady  had  not  even  distantly  al- 
luded to  Dr.  Cautley  for  as  many  as  ten 
months.  After  the  great  day  of  what  she 
called  Juliana's  "resignation"  she  seemed  to 
have  tacitly  agreed  that  since  Juliana  had 
spared  her  dream  she  would  spare  Juliana's. 
Did  she  not  know,  she  too,  that  the  dream  is 
the  reality?  As  Miss  Quincey,  gentle- 
woman at  large,  Juliana  had  a  perfect  right 
to  set  up  a  dream  of  her  own ;  as  to  whether 
she  was  able  to  afford  the  luxury,  Juliana 
was  the  best  judge.  Her  present  wonder, 
then,  had  no  malignant  reference;  it  was 
simply  wrung  from  her  by  inexorable  econ- 


1 62  Superseded 

omy.  Juliana's  supplies  were  calculated  to 
last  a  year;  as  it  was  the  winter  season  that 
they  had  lately  weathered,  she  was  rather 
more  than  three-quarters  of  the  way  through 
her  slender  resources,  and  it  behoved  them  to 
look  out  for  bills  ahead.  And  Mrs.  Moon 
had  always  suspected  that  young  man,  not 
only  of  a  passion  for  mare's-nesting,  but  of 
deliberately  and  systematically  keeping  back 
his  accounts  that  he  might  revel  in  a  larger 
haul. 

The  remark,  falling  with  a  shock  all  the 
greater  for  a  silence  of  ten  months,  had  the 
effect  of  driving  Juliana  out  of  the  room. 
Out  of  the  room  and  out  of  the  house,  down 
High  Street,  where  Hunter's  shop  was  al- 
ready blossoming  in  another  spring;  up 
Park  Street  and  past  the  long  wall  of  St. 
Sidwell's,  till  she  found  herself  alone  in 
Primrose  Hill  Park. 

The  young  day  was  so  glorious  that  Miss 
Quincey  had  some  thoughts  of  climbing 
Primrose  Hill  and  sitting  on  the  top;  but 


Dr.  Cautley  Sends  in  His  Bill     163 

after  twenty  yards  or  so  of  it  she  abandoned 
the  attempt.  For  the  last  few  months  her 
heart  had  been  the  seat  of  certain  curious 
sensations,  so  remarkably  like  those  she  had 
experienced  in  the  summer  that  she  took 
them  for  the  same,  and  sternly  resolved  to 
suppress  their  existence  by  ignoring  it. 
That,  she  understood,  was  the  right  treat- 
ment for  hysteria. 

But  this  morning  Miss  Quincey's  heart 
protested  so  violently  against  her  notion  of 
ascending  Primrose  Hill,  threatening  indeed 
to  strangle  her  if  she  persisted  in  it,  that 
Miss  Quincey  unwillingly  gave  in  and  con- 
tented herself  with  a  seat  in  one  of  the  lower 
walks  of  the  park.  There  she  leaned  back 
and  looked  about  her,  but  with  no  permanent 
interest  in  one  thing  more  than  another. 

Presently,  as  she  settled  down  to  quieter 
breathing,  there  came  to  her  a  strange  sensa- 
tion, that  grew  till  it  became  an  unusually 
vivid  perception  of  the  outer  world;  a  per- 
ception mingled  with  a  still  stranger  double 


i  64  Superseded 

vision,  a  sense  that  seemed  to  be  born  in  the 
dark  of  the  brain  and  to  be  moving  there  to 
a  foregone  conclusion.  And  all  the  time  her 
eyes  were  busy,  now  with  a  bush  of  May  in 
crimson  blossom,  now  with  the  many- 
pointed  leaves  of  a  sycamore  pricked  against 
the  blue;  now  with  the  straight  rectangular 
paths  that  made  the  park  an  immense  mathe- 
matical diagram.  From  where  she  sat  her 
eyes  swept  the  length  of  the  wide  walk  that 
cuts  the  green  from  east  to  west.  Far  down 
at  the  west  end  was  a  seat,  and  she  could  see 
two  people,  a  man  and  a  woman,  sitting  on 
it;  they  must  have  been  there  a  quarter  of  an 
hour  or  more;  she  had  noticed  them  ever 
since  she  came  into  the  park. 

They  had  risen,  and  her  gaze  left  every- 
thing else  to  follow  them;  or  rather,  it  went 
to  meet  them,  for  they  had  turned  and  were 
coming  slowly  eastward  now.  They  had 
stopped;  they  were  facing  each  other,  and 
her  gaze  rested  with  them,  fascinated  yet  un- 
certain. And  now  she  could  see  nothing 
else;  the  park,  with  the  regions  beyond  it 


Dr.  Cautley  Sends  in  His  Bill     165 

and  the  sky  above  it,  had  become  merely  a 
setting  for  one  man  and  one  woman;  the 
avenue,  fresh  strewn  with  red  golden  gravel, 
led  up  to  them  and  ended  there  at  their  feet; 
a  young  poplar  trembled  in  the  wind  and 
shook  its  silver  green  fans  above  them  in 
delicate  confusion.  The  next  minute  a  light 
went  up  in  that  obscure  and  prophetic  back- 
ground of  her  brain;  and  she  saw  Rhoda 
Vivian  and  Bastian  Cautley  coming  towards 
her,  greeting  her,  with  their  kind  faces 
shining. 

She  rose,  turned  from  them,  and  went 
slowly  home. 

It  was  the  last  rent  in  the  veil  of  illusion 
that  Rhoda  had  spun  so  well.  Up  till  then 
Miss  Quincey  had  seen  only  half  the  truth. 
Now  she  had  seen  the  whole,  with  all  that 
Rhoda  had  disguised  and  kept  hidden  from 
her;  the  truth  that  kills  or  cures. 

Miss  Quincey  did  not  go  out  again  that 
day,  but  sat  all  afternoon  silent  in  her  chair. 
Towards  evening  she  became  talkative  and 
stayed  up  later  than  had  been  her  wont  since 


1 66  Superseded 

she  recovered  her  freedom.  She  seemed  to 
be  trying  to  make  up  to  her  aunt  for  a  want 
of  sociability  in  the  past. 

At  eleven  she  got  up  and  stood  before  the 
Old  Lady  in  the  attitude  of  a  penitent.  Ap- 
parently she  had  been  seized  with  a  mysteri- 
ous impulse  of  confession. 

"Aunt,"  she  said,  "there's  something  I 
want  to  say  to  you." 

She  paused,  casting  about  in  her  mind  for 
the  sins  she  had  committed.  They  were 
three  in  all. 

"I  am  afraid  I  have  been  very  extrava- 
gant"— she  was  thinking  of  the  blouse — 
"and — and  very  foolish" — she  was  thinking 
of  Bastian  Cautley — "and  very  selfish" — she 
was  thinking  of  her  momentary  desire  to 
die. 

"Juliana,  if  you're  worrying  about  that 
money" — the  Old  Lady  was  thinking  of 
nothing  else — "don't.  I've  plenty  for  us 
both.  As  long  as  we  can  keep  together  I 
don't  care  what  I  eat,  nor  what  I  drink,  nor 
what  I  put  on  my  poor  back.  And  if  the 


Dr.  Cautley  Sends  in  His  Bill    167 

worst  comes  to  the  worst  I'll  sell  the  furni- 
ture." 

It  seemed  to  Miss  Quincey  that  she  had 
never  known  her  aunt  in  all  those  five-and- 
twenty  years;  never  known  her  until  this 
minute.  For  perhaps,  after  all,  being  angry 
with  Juliana  was  only  Mrs.  Moon's  way  of 
being  sorry  for  her.  But  how  was  Juliana 
to  know  that  ? 

"Only,"  continued  the  Old  Lady,  "I  won't 
part  with  your  uncle's  picture.  Don't  ask 
me  to  part  with  your  uncle's  picture." 

"You  won't  have  to  part  with  anything. 
Fll — I'll  get  something  to  do.  I'm  not  wor- 
rying. There's  nothing  to  worry  about." 

She  stooped  down  and  tenderly  kissed  the 
wrinkled  forehead. 

A  vague  fear  clutched  at  the  Old  Lady's 
heart. 

"Then,  Juliana,  you  are  not  well.  Hadn't 
you  better  see" — she  hesitated — pausing 
with  unwonted  delicacy  for  her  words — "a 
doctor?" 

"I  don't  want  to  see  a  doctor.     There  is 


1 68  Superseded 

nothing  the  matter  with  me."  And  still  in- 
sisting that  there  was  nothing  the  matter 
with  her,  she  went  to  bed. 

And  old  Martha  had  come  with  her  early 
morning  croak  to  call  Miss  Juliana ;  she  had 
dumped  down  the  hot-water  can  in  the  basin 
with  a  clash,  pulled  up  the  blind  with  a  jerk, 
and  drawn  back  the  curtains  with  a  clatter, 
before  she  noticed  that  Miss  Juliana  was  up 
all  the  time.  Up  and  dressed,  and  sitting  in 
her  chair  by  the  hearth,  warming  her  feet  at 
an  imaginary  fire. 

She  had  been  sitting  up  all  night,  for  her 
bed  was  as  Martha  had  left  it  the  night  be- 
fore. Martha  approached  cautiously,  still 
feeling  her  way,  though  there  was  no  need 
for  it,  the  room  being  full  of  light. 

She  groped  like  a  blind  woman  for  Miss 
Juliana's  forehead,  laying  her  hand  there 
before  she  looked  into  her  face. 

After  some  fumbling  futile  experiments 
with  brandy,  a  looking-glass  and  a  feather, 
old  Martha  hid  these  things  carefully  out  of 


Dr.  Cautley  Sends  in  His  Bill    169 

sight;  she  disarranged  the  bed,  turning  back 
the  clothes  as  they  might  have  been  left  by 
one  newly  wakened  and  risen  out  of  it;  drew 
a  shawl  over  the  head  and  shoulders  of  the 
figure  in  the  chair;  pulled  down  the  blind  and 
closed  the  curtains  till  the  room  was  dark 
again.  Then  she  groped  her  way  out  and 
down  the  stairs  to  her  mistress's  door. 
There  she  stayed  a  moment,  gathering  her 
feeble  wits  together  for  the  part  she  meant  to 
play.  She  had  made  up  her  mind  what  she 
would  do. 

So  she  called  the  Old  Lady  as  usual;  said 
she  was  afraid  there  was  something  the 
matter  with  Miss  Juliana ;  thought  she  might 
have  got  up  a  bit  too  early  and  turned  faint 
like. 

The  Old  Lady  answered  that  she  would 
come  and  see;  and  the  two  crept  up  the 
stairs,  and  went  groping  their  way  in  the 
dark  of  the  curtained  room.  Old  Martha 
fumbled  a  long  time  with  the  blind;  she  drew 
back  the  curtains  little  by  little,  with  infinite 


1 JQ  Superseded 

precaution  letting  in  the  light  upon  the  fear- 
ful thing. 

But  the  Old  Lady  approached  it  boldly. 

"Don't  you  know  me,  Jooley  dear?"  she 
said,  peering  into  the  strange  eyes.  There 
was  no  recognition  in  them  for  all  their 
staring. 

"Don't  know  me,  m'm,"  said  Martha 
soothingly;  "seems  all  of  a  white  swoon, 
don't  she?" 

Martha  was  warming  to  her  part.  She 
made  herself  busy;  she  brought  hot  water 
bottles  and  eau  de  cologne ;  she  spent  twenty 
minutes  chafing  the  hands  and  forehead  and 
laying  warmth  to  the  feet,  that  the  Old  Lady 
might  have  the  comfort  of  knowing  that 
everything  had  been  done  that  could  be  done. 
She  shuffled  off  to  find  brandy,  as  if  she  had 
only  thought  of  it  that  instant;  and  she 
played  out  the  play  with  the  looking-glass 
and  the  feather. 

The  feather  fluttered  to  the  floor,  and 
Martha  ceased  bending  and  peering,  and 
looked  at  her  mistress. 


Dr.  Cautley  Sends  in  His  Bill     171 

"She's  gone,  ni'm,  I  do  believe." 

The  Old  Lady  sank  by  the  chair,  her  arms 

clinging  to  those  rigid  knees. 

"Jooley — Jooley — don't  you  know  me?" 

she  cried,  as  if  in  a  passion  of  affront. 


CHAPTER  XII 
Epilogue.— Gbe  /Ran  an&  tbe  Idoman 

BY  daylight  there  is  neither  glamour  nor 
beauty  in  the  great  burying-ground  of 
North  London ;  you  must  go  to  it  at  evening, 
in  the  first  fall  of  the  summer  dusk,  to  feel  the 
fascination  of  that  labyrinth  of  low  graves, 
crosses  and  headstones,  urns  and  sarcophagi, 
crowded  in  the  black-green  of  the  grass;  of 
marble  columns,  granite  pyramids  and 
obelisks,  massed  and  reared  and  piled  in  the 
grey  of  the  air.  It  is  nothing  if  not  fantas- 
tic. Even  by  day  that  same  mad  grouping 
and  jostling  of  monumental  devices,  gath- 
ered together  from  the  ends  of  the  world, 
gives  to  the  place  a  cheerful  half-pagan 
character;  now,  in  its  confusion  and  im- 
mensity, it  might  be  some  city  of  dreams, 
tossed  up  in  cloud  and  foam  and  frozen  into 
172 


The  Man  and  the  Woman    173 

marble;  some  aerial  half-way  limbo  where 
life  slips  a  little  from  the  living  and  death 
from  the  dead. 

For  these  have  their  own  way  here.  No 
priest  interferes  with  them,  and  whatever 
secular  power  ordains  these  matters  is  in- 
dulgent to  its  children.  If  one  of  them  would 
have  his  horse  or  his  dog  carved  on  his  tomb 
instead  of  an  angel,  or  a  pair  of  compasses 
instead  of  a  cross,  there  is  no  one  to  thwart 
his  fancy.  He  may  even  be  humorous  if  he 
will.  It  is  as  if  he  implored  us  to  laugh  with 
him  a  little  while  though  the  jest  be  feeble, 
and  not  to  chill  him  with  so  many  tears. 

At  twilight  a  man  and  a  woman  were 
threading  their  way  through  this  cemetery, 
and  as  they  went  they  smiled  faintly  at  the 
memorial  caprices  of  the  living  and  the  still 
quainter  originalities  of  the  dead.  But  on 
the  whole  they  seemed  to  be  trying  not  to 
look  too  happy.  They  said  nothing  to  each 
other  till  they  came  to  a  mound  raised  some- 
where in  the  borderland  that  divides  the 
graves  of  the  rich  from  the  paupers'  ground. 


1 74  Superseded 

There  was  just  room  for  them  to  stand  to- 
gether on  the  boards  that  roofed  in  the  nar- 
row pit  dug  ready  for  the  next  comer. 

"If  I  believed  in  a  Creator"  (it  was  the 
man  who  spoke),  "I  should  want  to  know 
what  pleasure  he  found  in  creating  that  poor 
little  woman." 

The  woman  did  not  answer  as  she  looked 
at  him. 

"Yet,"  he  went  on,  "I'm  selfish  enough  to 
be  glad  that  she  lived.  If  I  had  not  known 
Miss  Quincey,  I  should  not  have  known 
you." 

"And  I,"  said  the  woman,  and  her  face 
was  rosy  under  the  touch  of  grief,  "if  I  had 
not  loved  Miss  Quincey,  I  could  not  have 
loved  you." 

They  seemed  to  think  Miss  Quincey  had 
justified  her  existence.  Perhaps  she  had. 

And  the  woman  took  the  roses  that  she 
wore  in  her  belt  and  laid  them  on  the  breast 
of  the  grave.  She  stood  for  a  minute  study- 
ing the  effect  with  a  shamefaced  look,  as  if 
she  had  mocked  the  dead  woman  with 


The  Man  and  the  Woman   175 

flowers  flung  from  her  wedding-wreath  of 
youth  and  joy. 

Then  she  turned  to  the  man;  the  closing 
bell  tolled,  and  they  passed  through  the  iron 
gates  into  the  ways  of  the  living. 


THE    END 


A  Novel  of  Distinction  Praised  by  Authorities 

The  Professor's  Legacy 

By  MRS.  ALFRED  SIDGWICK. 

A  love  story  of  German  University  and  English 
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"One  of  the  most  interesting  and  well-told  novels  of  the  season, 
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clever,  pretty  book."— San  Francisco  Argonaut. 

"There  are  many  readers  who  will  be  grateful  for  having  had 
it  brought  to  their  attention." — Life. 

By  a  New  Author  of  Promise 

The   Nonchalante 

By  STANLEY  OLMSTED. 

Casual  data  touching  the  career  of  Dixie  Bilton, 
Operettensaengerin.   $1.25. 

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and,  barring  the  author's  mannerisms,  is  one  of  the  really  strik- 
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"Dixie  Bilton  brings  before  us  a  tantalizing  and  highly  compli- 
cated temperament.  .  .  .  Aside  from  the  cleverly  drawn  leading 
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Henry       Holt       and       Company 

Publishers  (iv  '06)  New  York 


"An  exceedingly  fascinating  tale  of  extraordinary  adventures." 

— Boston  Transcript. 


THE 
SEA 
MAID 


BY  RONALD 
MACDONALD 


The  strange  experiences  of  the  shipwrecked  Dean  of  Beckmin  s- 
ter,  his  prim  wife,  and  beautiful  daughter  on  an  uncharted 
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"Humor  smiling  up  from  every  page." — Louisville  Courier- 
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"A  charming  Miranda.  ...  A  fresh,  unconventional  bit  of  fic- 
tion by  a  writer  who  seems  to  have  good  humor,  good  wit,  and 
a  style  of  his  own."— N.  Y.  Globe. 

"Its  merry,  rattling  pace,  the  fun  which  sparkles  through  it, 
does  not  blind  one  to  its  wild  impossibility,  but  simply  makes  it 
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"Holds  the  reader  absorbed  *  *  *  will  stir  the  blood  of 
any  not  deaf  to  the  inspiration  of  brave  deeds."— Book  News. 

Losers'   Luck 

By  CHARLES  TENNEY  JACKSON. 

A  story  of  filibusters  of  reckless  humor  and  courage,  who 
fought,  and  most  of  whom  died,  for  a  woman.  The  scenes  are 
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fever  of  enthusiasm,  *  *  *  it  sweeps  you  along  *  *  *  unusually 
readable." — New  York  Times  Review. 

"Remarkably  amusing  *  *  *  engagingly  told  *  *  *  The  sort  of 
story  the  reader  pursues  eagerly  to  the  last  line — and  is  sorry 
when  he  gets  there." — Chicago  Evening  Post. 

"This  lively  book  may  be  described  as  a  blend  of  Bret  Hart  and 
Mr.  Richard  Harding  Davis,  and  the  mixture  is  commendable." — 
Dial. 

"Thrilling  romance  *  *  *  One  of  the  liveliest  tales  of  adven- 
ture the  season  has  produced  *  *  *  Literally  brimful  of  startling 
action,  incident,  vivid  color;  the  plot  is  certainly  unhackneyed  ; 
*  *  *  a  refreshing,  stimulating  atmosphere  of  onrushing  energy 
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"Lots  of  love-making  ;  lots  of  fighting  ;  lots  of  adventure.  We 
commend  "Losers'  Luck."  *  *  *  A  book  like  this  is  often  worth  a 
dozen  of  the  plodding,  petty  realistic  sort." — The  Argonaut,  San 
Prancisco. 


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(iv,  '06) 


C  o  m  p  a  n  y 

York 


A  remarkable  humorous  yarn 

That  has  been  compared  favorably  with  the  work  of 
Dickens,  Stockton,  Hark  Twain  and  Jacobs. 

The    Belted    Seas 

By  ARTHUR  COLTON 

A  story  of  the  wild  voyages  of  the  irrepressible  Captain 
Buckingham  in  Southern  seas.  Not  the  least  attractive  of  its 
features  are  the  occasional  snatches  of  verse.  lamo,  $1.50 


New  York  Evening- Post :  "A  whimsical  Odyssey.  .  .  .  What 
Jacobs  has  done  for  the  British  seaman,  Colton  has  done  for  the  Yankee 
sailor." 

Cincinnati  Enquirer  :  "  Never  has  the  peculiar  brand  of  humor  which 
South  America  affords  been  more  skilfully  exploited  than  by  Arthur  Colton 
in  The  Belted  Seas  .  .  .  .  It  is  a  joyous  book,  and  he  were  a  hardened 
reader  indeed  who  would  not  chortle  with  satisfaction  over  Kid  Saddler's 
adventures  at  Portate  ....  Many  of  the  stories  are  uproariously  funny 
and  recall  Stockton  at  his  best,  yet  with  a  human  appeal,  pathetic  rather 
than  comic — two  of  the  very  best  qualities  which  vibrate  in  Mark  Twain's 
work." 

Life  :  "  Colton  always  has  something  to  say  ...  a  sailor's  yarn 
spun  in  an  old  tavern  on  Long  Island  to  a  company  worthy  of  Dickens." 

ffeiv  York  Tribune:  "  A  humorist,  spontaneous  and  demure  ... 
droll  all  through." 

Neiv  York  Globe  :  "  The  best  thing  about  these  stories  is  that  they 
are  told  just  as  they  happened — at  least  so  it  seems.  It  seems  to  be  the 
old  sea  captain  talking  rather  than  a  literary  man  writing,  to  produce 
which  illusion  is,  of  course,  the  perfection  of  literary  art." 

Public  Opinion  :  "  Colton's  sailormen  are  flesh  and  blood." 

Chicago  Tribune  :  "  Amazing  tales  of  the  sea.  .  .  .  The  whole 
book  is  enjoyable." 

Chicago  Record-Herald :  "  Humor  pervades  every  paragraph.  .  .  . 
There  is  no  lack  of  quiet  philosophy." 


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TWO    BOOKS    ON    VITAL    QUESTIONS 
FOR    THOUGHTFUL    AMERICANS 

THE  NEGRO  AND   THE  NATION 

By  GEORGE   S.  MERRIAM 

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There  is  much  that  tempts  quotation.  .  .  .  Mr  Merriam  has  given 
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STUDIES   IN 
AMERICAN    TRADE-UNIONISM 

J.    H.    HOLLANDER    and  G.    E.    BARNETT    (E  liters) 

Twelve  papers  by  graduate  students  and  officers  of 
Johns  Hopkins  University,  the  results  of  original  investiga- 
tions of  representative  Trade  Unions.  There  are  also 
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SHAKESPEARE, 


Brooke's   Ten   Plays   of   Shakespeare 

By  STOPFORD  A.  BROOKE 
8vo.  GUt  top,  $2.25  net.    By  mail,  $2.38 

An  interpretation  of  the  methods  of  Shakespeare  as  an  artist  by 
the  well-known  writer  ou  English  literary  history.  Each  play  consid- 
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By  HENRY  THEW  STEPHENSON 
With  42  illustrations,  357pp.   I2mo.    $2.00  net.  By  mail,   $2.15 

At  once  a  vivid  portrayal  and  a  careful  and  scholarly  study, 
largely  from  contemporaneous  sources,  of  the  topography,  customs,  and 
picturesque  side  of  Elizabethan  life.  The  illustrations  are  mostly  from 
old  prints. 

"Excellent  reason  for  appearance  *  *  *  It  is  something  more  than 
a  mere  topographical  survey  ;  the  daily  life  of  the  people  is  described  as 
vividly  as  their  streets,  their  houses,  and  the  mere  external  aspects  of 
their  week  to  week  existence  *  *  *  Brings  each  scene  directly  before 
the  eye  of  the  reader."— Boston  Transcript. 

Ten    Brink's    Five    Lectures   on   Shakespeare 

Translated  by  JULIA  FRANKLIN 
12mo.  Gilt  top,  $1.25 

Contents:  The  Poet  and  the  Man ;  The  Chronology  of  Shake- 
speare's Works  ;  Shakespeare  as  Dramatist,  as  Comic  Poet,  as  Tragic 
Writer. 

"No  single  volume  on  the  great  dramatist  is,  in  our  judgment, 
superior  in  value  to  this  modest  but  extremely  able  work."—  Outlook. 

Henry     Holt     and     Company 

Publishers  (ii,  '06)  New  York 


"On»  »f  tJlt  mut  important  ttoh  en  muiie  that  flat  evir  lien  published."— 
W.  J.  HENDERSON  in  the  N.  Y.  TIMES. 

FOURTH  EDITION,  with  a  new  chapter  by  H.  E.  KREHBIEL, 
covering  Richard  Strauss,  Cornelius,  Goldmark,  Kienzl,  Hum- 
perdinck,  Smetana,  Dvorak,  Charpentier,  Elgar,  etc. 

LAVIGNAC'S 

Music  and  Musicians 

Translated  by  WILLIAM  MARCHANT. 

With    additional   chapters   by   HENRY  E.    KREHBIEL  on 
Music  IN  AMERICA  and  THE  PRESENT  STATE  or  THE  ART  or  Music. 

With  94  Illustrations  and  ;io  examples  in  Musical  Notation.  518  pp.,  nmo, 
<i.75  net.  By  mail,  $1.91. 

<J  A  brilliant,  sympathetic  and  authoritative  work  cover- 
ing musical  sound,  the  voice,  musical  instruments,  con- 
struction aesthetics  and  the  history  of  music.  A  veritable 
musical  cyclopedia,  with  some  thousand  topics  in  the  index. 

W.  F.  APTHORP  in  the  TRANSCRIPT  :— 

Admirably  written  in  its  way,  capitally  indexed,  and  of  genuine  value 
as  a  handy  book  of  reference.  It  contains  an  '--nmcnse  amount  of 
condensed  information  on  almost  every  point  connected  with  the  art 
•vhich  it  were  well  for  the  intelligent  music-lover  to  know.  .  .  .  Mr. 
Marchant  has  done  his  hard  task  of  translating  exceedingly  well.  .  .  . 
Well  worth  buying  and  owning  by  all  who  are  interested  in  musical 
knowledge. 

W.  J.  HENDERSON  in  the  N.  Y.  TIMES  :— 

A  truly  wonderful  production  ;  .  .  .  a  long  and  exhaustive  account 
of  the  manner  of  using  the  instruments  of  Mie  orchestra,  with  some 
highly  instructive  remarks  on  coloring.  .  .  Harmony  he  treats 
Tot  only  very  fully,  but  also  in  a  new  *nd  intensify  interesting  way. 
Counterpoint  is  discussed  with  great  thoroughness.  ...  It 
seems  to  have  been  his  idea  when  he  began  to  let  no  interesting  topic 
escape.  .  .  .  The  wonder  is  that  the  author  has  succeeded  in 
making  those  parts  of  the  book  which  ought  naturally  to  be  dry  so  read' 
able.  ...  A  style  which  can  be  fairly  described  as  fascinating. 
...  It  will  serve  as  a  general  reference  book  for  either  the  musician 
or  the  music-lover.  It  will  save  money  in  the  purchase  of  a  library  by 
filling  the  places  of  several  smaller  books.  .  .  .  A  complete  directory 
of  musical  literature.  .  .  .  One  of  the  most  important  bonks  on 
music  that  have  ever  been  published. 

HENRY    HOLT    &    COMPANY, 

NEIT  YORK.  (viii/oj).  CHICAGO. 


University  of  California 

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405  Hilgard  Avenue,  Los  Angeles,  CA  90024-1388 

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